Farrell and Newman are experts in their field, but this book will fail to convince many readers.
Two senior academics examine how the U.S. seeks to exert global power in the digital age.
Between them, Farrell, a professor at Johns Hopkins and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Newman, a professor at Georgetown, have a huge amount of expertise in foreign policy and international relations. In this collaboration, they adamantly assert that the U.S. is the supreme power in the world, dominating enemies and allies alike. The key is the effective control of critical elements of the world’s technological systems. Far from being a decentralized network, the information web depends on a relatively small number of “choke points,” most of them in American territory. Since 9/11, successive presidential administrations have used this situation as a tool for gathering intelligence and as a weapon for potentially cutting an adversary out of global communications. Connected to this is the domination of international capital flows, partly through economic weight and partly via forced compliance from banks and corporations. The authors have amassed a wealth of research material, but their overall argument is not entirely persuasive. After all, the idea of an empire—even an underground one—implies a high level of focused power, and anyone who examines U.S. foreign policy of the past two decades will quickly find failures as well as victories. Having power and using it effectively are very different things. Yes, pressure can be exerted through economic sanctions, but this does not mean guaranteed success. Russia still sits on a chunk of Ukraine; Iran has not collapsed; North Korea continues to make missiles; China continues to develop its surveillance state. As such, the global landscape is chaotic, adversarial, and unpredictable, as it has long been and will continue to be. Though the authors offer a number of intriguing ideas, the book is undermined by a persistent overstatement of its case.
Farrell and Newman are experts in their field, but this book will fail to convince many readers.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781250840554
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
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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