Deeply insightful advice for the coming decades.
A thorough investigation of “America’s top foreign policy challenge.”
One of the most significant geopolitical trends is the explosive growth of China. With assistance from Graff, Alperovitch, entrepreneur, cybersecurity expert, and founding member of the U.S. government’s Cyber Safety Review Board, warns that America is now engaged in “Cold War II” with a nation far more populous and efficient than the former Soviet Union —and just as skilled at bending the rules. The author begins with a fictional scenario describing China’s conquest of Taiwan in 2028. Most readers know that this is a long-standing Chinese obsession, but Alperovitch emphasizes that it would be a massive geopolitical triumph, assuring domination of the South China Sea and access to one of the world’s most valuable resources: computer chips. “Taiwan alone is responsible for nearly 40 percent of new computing power manufactured every year worldwide,” writes the author, adding that the Chinese are as productive, hardworking, and imaginative as Americans—and there are four times as many of them. Beijing’s goal of becoming the world’s top superpower seems inevitable unless U.S. officials act decisively. “To succeed over the next half century,” writes Alperovitch, the U.S. “needs to prioritize two broad enablers of innovation—semiconductor chips and immigration.” Regarding the latter, the author echoes other observers in his demonstration of how the U.S. discourages even skilled legal immigrants, a significant problem. Giving computer chips so much emphasis seems a stretch, but the author makes a convincing case that they are today’s primary engines of progress. Eschewing the usual homilies about freedom, the author urges America to pay more attention to traditional allies as well as China’s neighbors. “Other countries do not need to love us…and most of them…never will,” he writes. “But as long as they hate China more, they may prefer to partner with us.”
Deeply insightful advice for the coming decades.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781541704091
Page Count: 400
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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