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
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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