Fighting words from a political sage.
In this frank, strongly worded open letter to the next president, Madam Secretary summons her considerable experience to voice her dismay at the Bush administration’s misuse of power abroad.
Charming and witty enough to maintain the reader’s attention, Albright (The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs, 2006, etc.) does not mince words. As a keen witness to world affairs, she boldly asserts that America’s political capital has been “squandered,” presidential power “misused” and diplomacy and international law set aside in favor of aggression and bullying. She bemoans the “neglect of our allies [and] overreliance on the military, allowing the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to be the face of America.” Although 9/11 changed the stakes on the world stage, she has lived through the horrors of the last century and feels assured that America has “faced graver risks, kept our nerve, and overcome.” The author offers numerous historical examples of presidents weathering storms throughout the centuries, largely through a faith in diplomacy, from George Washington to the elder Bush. For the president elect, Albright identifies five trends that represent the greatest threats to American interests: terror and the rise of anti-Americanism; the erosion of international consensus on nuclear proliferation; doubts about the value of democracy; the backlash against globalization; and the tendency in America to withdraw in the face of threats. In Part One, she examines the nuts and bolts of the presidency, looking at past models and noting the importance of assembling a sound staff and having the courage to use force, the media and congressional leadership. Part Two explores ways of asserting effective foreign policy, especially where America’s reputation has been tarnished, such as in Europe, Latin America and Asia. Albright also provides pointed suggestions for dealing with crises in Venezuela, Pakistan, North Korea and Iraq.
Fighting words from a political sage.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-135180-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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
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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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