“Ukraine deserves its place in the sun as a truly independent nation, but it must be realistic about the journey to that...
The Cold War gets hotter, thanks to Russian ambitions to rebuild the Soviet empire—but, veteran foreign correspondent Kalb (The Road to War: Presidential Commitments Honored and Betrayed, 2013, etc.) writes, thanks as well to Western ineptitude.
It all comes down to Ukraine, a country that is really two countries, one Western-facing, the other bound to Russia. It’s the eastern one that Russia has been gnawing into, claiming bits of territory here and there, most notably the Crimea after the last Winter Olympics. There has been much mishandling on all sides, not least when pro-Russian forces shot down a civilian airliner, killing hundreds of mostly Dutch travelers. However, argues the author, who was nearly finished with a doctorate in Russian before being whisked off into journalism by Edward R. Murrow, much that has occurred recently seems nearly inevitable. It will not please Moscow to read his criticisms of Putin, but neither will it please Kiev to learn that he considers much of its claim to autonomy from Russia to be misguided. Even though Russia has been the aggressor in the recent strife, he suggests that any accommodation will largely have to come from the Ukrainian side: “the first step out of the current crisis is an acceptable modus vivendi between Russia and Ukraine, an arrangement under which Russia, because it is by far the stronger of the two, gets the larger half of the loaf, Ukraine the smaller one.” Kalb also writes casually of inborn “Slavic indolence,” which is not likely to win him points on the eastern shore of the Danube and beyond. Finally, correct or not, the present administration is unlikely to warm to Kalb’s policy recommendations, since he paints President Barack Obama as someone alternately bewildered by and uninterested in Russian affairs, particularly the boss, Putin.
“Ukraine deserves its place in the sun as a truly independent nation, but it must be realistic about the journey to that goal.” Realism is a keyword in this think-tank treatise of much interest to policy wonks.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8157-2664-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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