Paul Kennedy's Book Cover - The Fine Art of Being Wrong

This has to be one of my favourite book covers of all time:

That illustration on the bottom right so crisply summarises how easy it is for erudite intellectuals to be completely wrong.

Paul Kennedy’s 700+ page magnum opus was published in 1987 (when I was in college). This was the year that Japan’s per capita GDP overtook the USA’s for the first time. This was months before the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, a couple of years before the Berlin Wall fell. 

The tectonic plates of history were shifting. Harvard’s learned Professor Kennedy had understood history’s tectonic forces and had foreseen the shift. 

I remember the buzz this book created when it came out. Being able to quote fluently from Paul Kennedy was the hallmark of the undergraduate intellectual, the ultimate kunji for fundae-baazi. I bought a fat paperback copy for over Rs 600, gamely ploughed through about 250 pages, and felt guilty for at least a decade as the remaining 450+ pages mocked me from my bookshelf.

And now it seems Professor Kennedy hadn't quite worked it all out.

The future didn’t belong to Japan after all.

To be fair to Prof Kennedy, he is a historian not a crystal-ball gazer. He didn't make any specific predictions in this book. And his forward-looking subsequent book Preparing for the Twenty First Century was so anodyne it couldn't be wrong.

But I still love that illustration of Japan rising!