This book, pretty much ripped from the headlines, contains nothing surprising for followers of current affairs, but it’s...
In their second book, Daalder and Lindsay (co-authors: America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy, 2003) skewer almost every decision made by Donald Trump regarding the role of the United States on the world stage.
The co-authors, both experts in the field of foreign policy, explain that after World War II, U.S. presidents and their staffs made conscious decisions to assume the leadership role among all nations, not only for the benefit of the U.S., but also to advance social and economic progress in other countries. Some readers might react skeptically to such a rosy interpretation of foreign policy motives since 1945, but that hypothesis undergirds the narrative. Trump’s detractors will delight in the authors’ unrelenting criticism of the president, who is portrayed as selfish in his emphasis on “America First” and as ignorant for ignoring those he tapped to supposedly advise him. Daalder and Lindsay hark back to a 1987 letter Trump paid to publish in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe titled “There’s Nothing Wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy That a Little Backbone Can’t Cure.” Even then, it demonstrated his disdain for economic and military cooperation with other nations. The authors consistently demonstrate their grasp of what many other commentators failed to understand during the 2016 campaign: that Trump would never alter his rigid views if and when he occupied the White House. Within their negative critique of Trump, the authors offer alarming—and occasionally alarmist—scenarios about how the president might be ceding world leadership to the Chinese government. “A Chinese-dominated world would not be friendly to the United States,” they write. “Beijing has little incentive to resolve security crises to Washington’s satisfaction.”
This book, pretty much ripped from the headlines, contains nothing surprising for followers of current affairs, but it’s accessibly written and has worth as a primer for the previously inattentive.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5417-7385-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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