One Reviewer at Amazon,

J. Dillingham writes:

Walter Karp's "The Politics of War" is simply the most concise and powerful study in history I've ever read. Simply by sticking to the premise that history is made not by anonymous "forces" but by men of power acting out of self-interest, Karp turns stuff that was frankly dull in your high school textbooks - you remember the names: the Progressive Era, the gold standard, William Jennings Bryan, the Lusitania - into something not only gripping, but eerily reminiscent of what our nation is currently experiencing. Karp's portrait of Woodrow Wilson as a self-deluded, self-righteous, vainglorious would-be messiah determined to drag an unwilling nation into war to suit his own dreams of glory is especially powerful and damning.

The final chapter, "The Old America That Was Free and Is Now Dead," is simply the most powerful piece of writing I've ever read in a nonfiction work, comparable only to the conclusion of Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem." No one could ever accuse Walter Karp of hating his country; he hated what a few people had done to it, and that, as all too many would like us to forget these days, is something very different.