“We hope this book provides the material to understand what happened and why,” the authors conclude. Mission accomplished.
A revealing look at U.S.–China trade relations during the Trump administration.
In December 2018, an informal poll of 75 corporate executives attending a Washington, D.C., conference showed that roughly 50% believed that, in light of recent trade history, the U.S. and China would be at war within 30 years. Davis, a Pulitzer-winning senior editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau, and Wei, who works at the Journal’s Beijing bureau, depict this “romance gone bad” by focusing on the first three years of the Trump administration. According to the authors, a series of miscalculations and misunderstandings on both sides have brought the two nations to the current impasse. Chinese President Xi Jinping has failed to appreciate how his government’s subsidization of private companies and implausible denials of technological theft have alienated American officials. As for Donald Trump, the authors persuasively argue that his protectionist policies vis-à-vis China have achieved mixed results at best. Yet Trump “deserves credit for challenging the easy assumptions about China that had guided American policy since at least the Clinton administration,” particularly the idea that economic engagement would lead to political liberalization. General readers may be forgiven for skimming the more detailed passages, which depict the seemingly endless series of trade talks and controversies. Yet the authors skillfully enliven what could have been a dull narrative. Particularly diverting are the biographical sketches of the participants in the trade talks—including that of Peter Navarro, the profane hard-line economist in Trump’s administration—and a number of illuminating anecdotes and facts. China, for example, had the world’s largest economy “until roughly the U.S. Civil War,” and the Chinese refer to those who return home after working overseas as “hai gui,” or “sea turtles.”
“We hope this book provides the material to understand what happened and why,” the authors conclude. Mission accomplished.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-295305-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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 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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