Hoge and Zakaria, respectively editor and managing editor of Foreign Affairs, have collected 43 articles to commemorate the journal's 75 years of publication. Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of this volume is not its overview of a changing world during a turbulent century, but rather the subtle indications of a changing perception of that world. Many of the names and topics are expected: Kennan on containment of the Soviets; Kissinger on diplomacy; Morgenthau on foreign intervention; Brzezinski on the Cold War. But there are also surprises, especially during the earlier decades: renegade Marxist Kautsky on Germany after WW I; Italian philosopher Croce on liberty in the 1930s; Soviet theorist Bukharin on imperialism; and anthropologist Mead on what later came to be known as North-South relations. Together the selections constitute a short intellectual history of foreign-policy concerns. Despite the often gloomy realities, the early contributions are characterized by a belief that ideas matter and that a wide range of them are worth considering. The postWW II period is dominated by a narrower discourse of national interest within shared assumptions about a bipolar world. After the demise of the Soviet Union, the articles share a sense of discovery that the world is a much more complex place than could ever have been imagined during the Cold War. This evolution in the mindset dominating the pages of Foreign Affairs reflects both the journal's failure and its success. Its goal, announced in the lead article of the first issue, was to educate the broad public about foreign events and issues. It has remained, however, largely a forum for the intelligentsia. The evidence that the experts have learned a lot over the years, however, suggests that the journal nevertheless deserves its reputation as the place for serious discussions of foreign policy. Well worth reading. (16 pages photos) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-465-00170-X
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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