Outstanding, only modestly alarmist geopolitics.
A combination of historical survey and contemporary analysis at the intersection of globalization and naval power.
Though writers regularly deplore globalization and few extol the massive American Navy, Easterbrook delivers an intensely researched, largely admiring account of both. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, write the author, agree that world trade often “hurts American workers,” but this is “flat-earth thinking.” However, “in the most recent century-length period, 1920 to 2020, global population trebled, while global GDP rose twentyfold.” World poverty plummeted, while trade’s share of the world economy jumped from 5% to 25%, and “95 percent of goods in commerce travel via water." Members of our so-called blue age, writes Easterbrook, “have lived better than any generation before, sacrificed less…been safer, and received better care than any other generation, in part because the seas are tranquil and affordable goods arrive on time.” Essential to trade are titanic container vessels that sail the world’s essentially ungoverned oceans, dominated for almost a century by the U.S. Navy. Shipping a container from Shanghai to Los Angeles today costs less than moving that same container across LA. Policing this is expensive; the 2020 “Navy budget worked out to $700 per American adult.” But recent presidents have largely ignored sea power, and Americans pay little attention except when denouncing globalization. Like many before him, Easterbrook warns that climate change could derail progress by roiling ocean conditions and disrupting food production. Most ominously, a resurgent China aims for “military parity” by 2049, and few doubt that this will happen. The author emphasizes that the blue age will continue only if the U.S. and China can get along. Easterbrook is fighting an uphill battle, but he makes a reasonable and convincing case that international trade under the benign aegis of the U.S. Navy plays an essential role that will not continue unless we adapt to a changing world.
Outstanding, only modestly alarmist geopolitics.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-4254-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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