A breezy, informative profile on foreign service that serves as an inviting primer for prospective diplomats and their...
A career diplomat uses embassy cables to describe the complex lives of foreign service officers.
When WikiLeaks published 251,287 cables in 2010, the massive leak of confidential information polarized the American public. But Thompson-Jones (Director, Global Studies and International Relations/Northeastern Univ.) is an academic and veteran diplomat, and her viewpoint is positive: the exposed cables describe daily life in U.S. embassies around the world. The author argues that the American people know very little about their ambassadors and fail to appreciate their delicate work. “When onetime presidential candidate Ross Perot famously said that diplomats could be replaced by fax machines,” she writes, “he ignored the real art in delivering a message that offers an opportunity for a conversation. Diplomats listen for a reaction. In many cultures a diplomat has to know when yes means no, or maybe, or we’ll see.” Thompson-Jones dedicates much of her book to major themes, such as “travel” and “frenemies,” and she boils down entire countries to one quality or another: Bulgaria, to Thompson-Jones, represents “corruption,” and she describes the nation through its web of organized crime. Most of her quotes derive from cables, which are heavy with perspective and nuance. The most dramatic chapter focuses on Iraq, an assignment that most diplomats resented, but the book is dense with provocative anecdotes from around the globe—e.g., one diplomat in China was shocked to find a bevy of abused tigers, alarming Washington, D.C., with his lurid descriptions. Not surprisingly, Thompson-Jones writes about sticky situations in a diplomatic way. “The transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama brought with it a long-needed lift in America’s world standing,” she writes carefully. The author dedicates a final chapter to Hillary Clinton, thoughtfully assessing her tenure as secretary of state. Amid the current heated election cycle, Thompson-Jones provides some sharp insights into Clinton’s performance.
A breezy, informative profile on foreign service that serves as an inviting primer for prospective diplomats and their admirers.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24658-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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