Of interest to observers of the unfolding constitutional crisis as well as of Russia’s place in the international order.
A former U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation offers a gimlet-eyed view of the new Cold War.
In 2014, when he announced that he was leaving his post as the Obama administration’s ambassador, McFaul (Political Science/Stanford Univ.; Advancing Democracy Abroad, 2009, etc.) writes that “a prominent pro-Kremlin nationalist told me he was glad to see me go.” The reason: McFaul, unlike many politically appointed diplomats, actually knew something about the country, so much so, as a Stanford Kremlinologist, that Putin was said to have feared him. The author returns the favor. As he makes clear, Putin is no friend of the U.S., and in the most recent iterations of the Cold War, especially the proxy struggle to support or undermine, respectively, an independent Ukraine, he has become ever more anti-American while at the same time progressively “weakening checks on his power.” In some sense, it did not help that Obama backed off from the old U.S. mission, nominal or not, of spreading democracy. Putin certainly had no problem with spreading autocracy, even as Obama “did not support the use of coercive power to pressure dictatorships into democratizing.” But McFaul’s post-mortem on the Obama-Putin relationship is of less immediate interest than his view of the current morass. As he notes, Donald Trump enjoys far greater popularity in polls in Russia than at home, and although Putin may not have directly made Trump president—“American voters did that”—Trump has proven to be a highly useful tool for the Russian autocrat’s ends. He has validated Putin’s claim that the Western media are slanted and untrustworthy, refused to impose congressionally mandated sanctions, and, in his obsession with the “deep state,” has played straight into Putin’s conspiracy theories. Even if, as McFaul writes, “the American backlash against Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election has begun,” it may come too little and too late.
Of interest to observers of the unfolding constitutional crisis as well as of Russia’s place in the international order.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-71624-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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