Some readers may not be convinced, but this book deserves a broad audience, especially in our current political climate.
George W. Bush’s secretary of state returns to her academic roots with this accessibly written study of that imperfect but ideal form of government.
The United States is strongly and customarily identified as the democratic power par excellence. However, urges Rice (No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington, 2011, etc.), now a professor in the business school at Stanford University, democracy is not an exclusively American province, nor is there compelling reason to believe that other nations cannot enjoy the freedoms it affords. Having witnessed at close hand the Arab Spring and the fall of the Soviet Union, the author examines several avenues leading to democratic formation, including the collapse of a totalitarian regime that leaves an “institutional vacuum,” one capable of being filled by democratic agencies that may be weak at first, as well as the development of a quasi-democracy that may evolve into a more truly democratic system. In the latter instance, she writes, meaningfully, “an executive with too much power, ruling by decree and circumventing other institutions, is a sure path to authoritarian relapse.” The remark is evidently directed to the likes of Vladimir Putin and other autocrats, but much of Rice’s conversational and sharp book can be read as a quiet rebuke of the current occupant of the White House, who is no friend to the small-d democratic establishment in which Rice long made her career. Generally speaking, the author seems optimistic about the eventual odds of the world following the “path to liberty.” Even so, she warns that there are many obstacles and impediments to democratic progress, with challenges such as inequality, “stalled social mobility,” and particularly a lack of educational opportunity for the poor, education being key to democratic development in the first place, as the Founders well knew. Along the way, Rice offers a conditional defense of externally imposed regime change in Iraq.
Some readers may not be convinced, but this book deserves a broad audience, especially in our current political climate.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5997-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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