The good news? “The UN will muddle along in the future.”
A heartbreaking book about a hardworking idealist’s frustrated attempts to restore the stature of the cumbersome United Nations in a world dominated by “the preemptively belligerent America.”
New York Times Magazine contributor Traub (The Devil’s Playground, 2004, etc.) offers a detailed account of Kofi Annan’s 1992–96 tenure as head of UN peacekeeping and then as the Secretary-General whose battering from the Bush Administration during its invasion of Iraq sent him into “something like a nervous breakdown,” and left the UN seriously weakened. The author depicts Annan as a modest and charming career civil servant. He joined the UN in 1962, taking a low-grade job in Geneva, and assumed his present leadership post in 1997, lionized as a peacemaker. After 9/11, things changed: The U.S. invaded Iraq without Security Council approval, and the UN’s failure to find a multilateral solution underscored its seeming irrelevance in an era of conflicts involving stateless terrorists. Written with Annan’s cooperation, the book traces the Nobel Peace Prize–winner’s struggle to build consensus and achieve reforms in the face of U.S. indifference (often shading into outright hostility) and the scandal over corruption in the UN’s Oil-For-Food program, which left him devastated. Traub’s hundreds of interviews produce stories of well-intentioned bureaucrats caught up in endless politicking and paper-pushing; sharp portraits of ineffectual, careerist aides in the Renaissance court-like atmosphere of Annan’s office on the 38th floor of the Secretariat Building; and many glimpses of the low-key Secretary-General in action as he searches for elusive common ground in meetings and on tours abroad. Annan sometimes seems emotionless to the point of being strange. He is unable to comfort a colleague upset by the deaths of 22 UN workers in Baghdad; he sits quietly, compulsively taking notes in a secret three-hour meeting called by former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke and other intimates to warn Annan that the UN’s grave situation requires a complete management overhaul.
The good news? “The UN will muddle along in the future.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-18220-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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