A neat dissection of current American tactics overseas that, understandably, as history has yet to be played out, leaves...
Intricately shaded and scary profile of President George W. Bush’s foreign policy team: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, and to a lesser degree Condoleeza Rice.
In a steady voice that likes to hew to the facts, Mann (About Face, 1999, etc.) profiles a group of associates with close, intricate, and overlapping ties. Dubbing themselves the Vulcans in honor of the Roman god of fire, they craft, in the stead of a president with little to no experience in the greater world, the global vision of the current administration, which the author broadly summarizes as a willingness to deploy sledgehammer and fire to protect and further American interests abroad. Not that this chorus sings in harmony, notes Mann: they have manifold strategic and tactical differences, but they share an overriding sense of the country’s potential as a unilateral military power, with its unbridled ability to affect events on the global stage. The author anatomizes in exquisite detail the players’ backgrounds and the experiences that shaped them, to whom they are beholden, and the trajectories of their careers—no mean feat with this seemingly incestuous and opportunistic lot, whose alliances and perspectives shift through time and space. But they all emphasize US supremacy, confrontational and self-interested, diplomatically thuggish, built on “coalitions” or “ad hoc assemblies, often not lasting beyond the crisis being confronted.” Iraq, of course, is the unpersuasive field test for their belief in retaliation, an emphasis on weapons on mass destruction (real or otherwise), stanching terrorism, containing the “axis of evil” states. None of these rationales obviously apply, but all are brought to bear. Mann doesn’t address the thorny question of how the Vulcans plan (or have failed to plan) to contend with the swarm of variables that assert themselves once the façade of tyranny is dismantled.
A neat dissection of current American tactics overseas that, understandably, as history has yet to be played out, leaves hanging the question of their efficacy.Pub Date: March 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03299-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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