A lucid text that raises questions while answering others—of great value to planners, whether of an advertising campaign or...
Strategy, that term beloved of war and business, is far more than a mere plan. So observes Freedman (War Studies/King’s Coll. London; A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East, 2008, etc.) in this comprehensive, vigorous survey of strategy and its evolution.
Strategy is a byproduct of conflict, or at least of situations “where interests collide and forms of resolution are required.” Beyond that, the definitions are many: It seems to be about developing a series of plans that balance ends and means with the resources available to attain those ends. Schools of thought have developed around strategy, with the Periclean supposedly concerned with accomplishing decisive victories, while the Sun Tzu method is to avoid direct confrontation whenever possible. However, Freedman valuably notes that there are plenty of instances in which Chinese strategists have gone full frontal while Greek strategists have employed ruses and deceptions, which introduces the notion of situationality. That is to say, the best strategy, in business or at war, would seem to be the one that most closely responds to actual situations on the ground and one that, as one of the strategists whom he studies remarks, may not even be clearly formulated ahead of time. In closing a text that takes in various bits of wisdom and experience from the likes of Napoleon, Mao, Bayard Rustin and Michel Foucault, Freedman also observes that strategic efforts to win some goal are just part of the task at hand—for, having won, there’s now the necessity to govern or to bring goods to new markets or to retain battled-for rights, etc.
A lucid text that raises questions while answering others—of great value to planners, whether of an advertising campaign or a military one.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-932515-3
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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