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CRASHBACK

Name: CRASHBACK
Author: Michael Fabey
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1204-1

THE POWER CLASH BETWEEN THE U.S. AND CHINA IN THE PACIFIC

by Michael Fabey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 24, 2017

Of interest to policy wonks, naval strategists, and specialists in the region.

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An examination of military confrontation in the western Pacific and the dangers it poses for those who now play a calculated game of chicken.

Take your pick: China is either our adversary or our friend. You’ll find plenty of books to support either position. Military journalist Fabey takes the former point of view; indeed, the first sentence is, “The United States and China are at war in the Western Pacific.” That war, he adds, hasn’t come down to widespread shooting—yet—but is nonetheless “warm,” waged over small atolls and islands that may not add up to much but stand as outposts of “military hegemony and the diplomatic and economic influence that naturally follows that hegemony.” Who the hegemon is depends on your point of view. The author would seem to agree with both the proposition that sovereign states have territorial rights and that U.S. shipping should enjoy freedom of the seas. He worries, naturally, that America is not playing hard enough—though the current administration supports hard power, it has isolationist tendencies, too. Fabey often writes as if possessed by the set piece– and cliché-happy ghost of Tom Clancy: “No other navy in the world would challenge it. But there was one navy that was willing to try”; “Can’t we just talk this over? At the highest echelons of the U.S. Navy there certainly are senior officers who are willing to do that…In short, they believe that the U.S. can actually trust China.” For all its alternately leaden and overwrought passages, however, there’s good on-the-ground (or, better, on-the-sea) reporting from both sides of the conflict. Fabey gives his Chinese sources a thorough workout, the little emperors and true believers alike, and he has a sharp eye for what faces the American fleet if push comes to shove, as well as for the countermeasures that U.S. military leaders are already taking by way of “naming and shaming” and otherwise containing China’s ambitions at sea.

Of interest to policy wonks, naval strategists, and specialists in the region.

Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5011-1204-1

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.