A valuable book for students of geopolitics and the ever turbulent Middle East.
Former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Rabinovich and national-security expert Valensi home in on the intractable problem of a Syria mired in civil war.
“Authoritative figures of the casualties…are unavailable,” write the authors, “but most sources agree that by the middle of 2019, close to half a million people had died in Syria, and close to 12 million Syrians had become refugees or…internally displaced persons.” In their cogent analysis, the authors trace the nation’s internal conflict to the early 1960s, when the Ba’th Party assumed rule. Crippled from the start by former colonizer France’s “divide and rule” strategy of drawing on minority populations to staff the military, the Ba’th Party was founded by “two Damascene intellectuals” whose program “offered a secular vision of Arab nationalism combined with a social democratic ideology.” This naturally put the regime athwart of the growing insurgent movement in recent years, but it also hampered the growth of the private sector. As of 2008, the authors write, even with a growing GNP, “almost 70 percent of Syrian employees earned less than one hundred dollars a month.” A decade ago, conditions were ripe for the civil war that followed, which featured proxy elements, the U.S. supporting rebels, Russia and Iran supporting the government. By 2014, the country had suffered a vast brain drain as its artists and intellectuals fled. The government, meanwhile, suffered a blow with the assassination of Iranian general and strategist Qasem Soleimani, killed by an American drone in January 2020. Yet American policy in the country, the authors rightly note, has been inconsistent thanks to Donald Trump’s “persistent desire to disengage from Syria.” This has favored the existing government and changed the face of the region’s political makeup, “shaped by the new roles of Iran and Turkey, and by America’s withdrawal and Russia’s resurgence.”
A valuable book for students of geopolitics and the ever turbulent Middle East.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-691-19331-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
