Bard presses every hot button in this incendiary exposé.
A tenaciously argued screed on the “malign influence” of the Arab lobby—specifically that of Saudi Arabia—on U.S. government policy.
In a pointed response to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s equally scathing The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), Bard (48 Hours of Kristallnacht, 2008, etc.) goes full throttle in pursuit of what he sees as a more insidious, if less vociferous behind-the-scenes lobby by the masters of Gulf oil and foes of Israel. While the pro-Israel lobby is centrally located in the extremely powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), characterized by the author as “open…transparent” and “extra-governmental,” the Arab lobby is a “many-headed hydra” whose “machinations are often difficult, if not impossible, to trace.” America’s interest in the Middle East grew out of its need for oil, rather than in any “chimerical” notions about the Holy Land, Bard writes, and thus its protection of the Saudi royal family since World War II is engrained in its national interest. The first Arab lobby efforts grew out of the Arab states’ alarm at the creation of Israel, and they used their oil might to blackmail the United States (“The Saudis have had us over a barrel from the moment of the first gusher”). The author looks carefully at the Arab states’ flexing of muscle during the embargo crisis of 1973 and boycott of Israel, the Saudi pressure to buy U.S. arms and President Carter’s pro-Palestinian “conversion.” Moreover, Bard contends, the creation of the Arab lobby coincided with the nascent years of the United Nations, which he sees as universally hostile to Israel concerns. After the Six Day War of 1967, the Arab lobby split between what he calls the “petrodiplomatic complex” and those Arab Americans supporting a Palestinian national consciousness. The author enumerates many acronym-heavy groups, including those he ascertains support Islamic terrorism. He also lists political campaigns and universities that have received heavy Arab (read: Saudi) funding, and he argues for an end to the heretofore ineffectual “policy of appeasement and indulgence of the Saudis and other Arabs.”
Bard presses every hot button in this incendiary exposé.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-172601-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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