A thorough, illuminating overview of major geopolitical shifts in 2019 involving America, Europe, and Turkey.
An expert looks at the interconnected foreign policies of the United States, Europe, and Turkey in 2019.
With opinion pieces published in the New York Times and articles featured in leading academic journals, in addition to her diplomatic career at the United Nations, Cherneva has established herself as a leading voice of a new generation of foreign relations experts. In this book, she eschews a traditional analysis of bilateral diplomacy and instead looks at the myriad calculations made by U.S. President Donald Trump, European leaders, and Turkish officials in 2019 and early 2020. Trump astonished the world, including fellow Republicans, in 2019 when he allowed Turkey to enter Kurdish-controlled territory in Syria that was previously protected by American troops. This reversal of nearly a half-century of U.S. support for the Kurds presaged a new era of international relations in the Near East. Moreover, Trump’s 2019 impeachment proceedings released private telephone calls and other materials related to the administration’s relationship with Ukraine that signaled to Europe the president’s foreign policy priorities. Now, more than ever, many European leaders understood that they “first need to appeal to the US President’s private business or political interests before they can get on the US foreign policy agenda.” Moreover, given Britain’s internal preoccupation with Brexit and Trump’s “hostility” to the European Union, Cherneva argues that French President Emmanuel Macron used the chaos of 2019 to his personal advantage in his quest to become the most powerful figure in Europe. Though she is an open supporter of Joe Biden’s presidential campaign and a critic of Turkey’s political regime, the author’s analysis is that of a skilled diplomat. Her study of the past year is nuanced and fair to all sides even when critical. The book also features an intriguing case study of the interconnection of human rights and global trade in her appraisal of German opposition to a proposed Volkswagen plant in Turkey. More historical context would have been helpful for general readers. But experts will gladly welcome Cherneva’s insights into an unprecedented year in international diplomacy.
A thorough, illuminating overview of major geopolitical shifts in 2019 involving America, Europe, and Turkey.Pub Date: Feb. 29, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.
The National Book Award winner delivers a handbook for an age in which egomania is morphing into autocracy at warp speed.
New Yorker contributor Gessen, an immigrant from what was then the Soviet Union, understands totalitarian systems, especially the ways in which, under totalitarian rule, language is degraded into meaninglessness. Today, writes the author, we are “using the language of political disagreement, judicial procedure, or partisan discussion to describe something that was crushing the system that such terminology was invented to describe.” Against that, Gessen suggests, we now have an administration for which words hold no reality, advancing the idea that “alternative facts” are fine but professing dismay when one calls them lies. The step-by-step degradation of democratic institutions that follows is a modern-day rejoinder to the fact that more than half a dozen years separated the Reichstag fire from World War II. That’s a big buffer of time in which to admit all manner of corruption, and all manner of corruption is what we’ve been seeing: Gessen reminds us about Mick Mulvaney’s accepting handsome gifts from the payday-loan industry he was supposed to regulate and Ben Carson’s attempt to stock his office with a $31,000 dining-room set. Yet corruption’s not the right word, writes the author, since Trump and company are quite open and even boastful about what used to be a matter of shame and duplicity. The real tragedy, it seems, is that they have been so successful in creating what the author calls a “new, smaller American society,” one that willfully excludes the Other. Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration’s missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Amy Siskind’s The List as a record of how far we have fallen.
Gessen is a Suetonius for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-18893-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
© Copyright 2024 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.
