Small ably traces how China went from partner to rival to threat and maps out the challenges that it now poses for the West.
A longtime China watcher takes a close look at the country’s ambitions, attitudes, and ruthless diplomatic and economic methods.
When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, many policymakers believed the nation would become an honest trading partner and responsible global citizen. Now, however, the Chinese government is viewed as secretive, belligerent, and wildly ambitious. Whereas most of the world treats globalization as a framework for trade and growth, China apparently sees it as the basis for a hierarchy with itself as the dominant force. How, asks Small, who has worked for a range of policy think tanks, did this transition happen? He follows a number of connected themes, although he sees a major trigger in the attempts of the Beijing-backed firm Huawei to establish 5G infrastructure around the world, using it as a means of control. Australia was the first country to reject Huawei, and others followed. China responded with insults and threats of retaliation, which cemented its reputation as a bully. European governments had also become aware that China was buying up critical infrastructure assets and companies in other countries. Another issue was China’s complete rejection of any responsibility for the Covid-19 pandemic despite mounting evidence that it had started there. “As the Chinese government’s growing self-confidence has bled into hubris, and as the polished, pragmatic heirs of Zhou Enlai have made way for diplomatic thugs,” writes Small, “the clarity of the challenge posed by China has sharpened.” Though China has bought a few allies with financial aid, notes the author, there is no underlying trust. Meanwhile, anti-China coalitions are building. Beijing’s methods have created the very situation it feared: everyone against it. Some of the ground in the book has already been covered, but Small does a good job tying the threads together and providing historical context, making for a comprehensive, if worrying, text.
Small ably traces how China went from partner to rival to threat and maps out the challenges that it now poses for the West.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68589-019-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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