An urgent warning guaranteed to cause nightmares—and frustrating, since we’re all powerless in the face of nuclear weapons.
A scarifying, play-by-play exercise in gaming an apocalyptic war.
When the Cold War ended, military tacticians pronounced nuclear warfare a thing of the past. Instead, writes Jacobsen, author of The Pentagon’s Brain, Area 51, and Operation Paperclip, the threat of nuclear holocaust is ever with us. Her scenario—based, she notes, on facts that will lead readers “to the razor’s edge of what can legally be known”—begins with a single thermonuclear missile landing on the Pentagon, atomizing millions of Washingtonians far out into the distant suburbs. That scenario hinges on the gamed-out supposition that it will be a rogue North Korea that fires a single offending missile, one hard to detect given that the existing technology can track the heat signature of a “hot” missile and perhaps shoot it down if given a time frame of five minutes, after which, as one technician says, “they cannot see the rocket after the rocket motor stops.” Still worse is to come, for in a counterlaunch that would surely vaporize North Korea with overwhelming force, Russia, fearing that some of those American rockets are heading its way, might launch a retaliatory strike that would unleash every available resource in the arsenal of both nations—collectively capable of destroying humankind hundreds of times over. Updating Orville Schell’s groundbreaking (and better written) 1982 book The Fate of the Earth, Jacobsen then outlines the very rapid collapse of civilization and the erasure of all our technologies—no more electricity grid, no more industrially farmed food, certainly no more internet—all leading to a world in which “only the ruthless survive” and in which “everyone loses. Everyone.” It’s a cheerless prognosis; however, by Jacobsen’s account, it’s altogether plausible.
An urgent warning guaranteed to cause nightmares—and frustrating, since we’re all powerless in the face of nuclear weapons.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9780593476093
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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 fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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