A consistently interesting, almost wholly persuasive vision of a future in which flow prevails over friction, where...
Global strategist Khanna (Asia and Globalization/National Univ. of Singapore; How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance, 2011, etc.) analyzes the new world of global connectivity.
Take what you think you know about globalization. Now add steroids. No ocean or continent goes untouched in the author’s version of how human life is organized on Earth. We are headed, he insists, for a supply-chain world where, following the ancient law of supply and demand, ever expanding infrastructures of all varieties (including Internet cables) will channel commerce and talent, binding us culturally and economically ever more closely, obscuring if not entirely eliminating national boundaries. In the endless struggle for leverage, “the supply chain tug-of-war,” ideology takes a back seat to commerce, and connectivity becomes paramount. A twin dynamic propels these infrastructure connections: first comes devolution, the fragmentation of territory into ever smaller units of authority (think the Soviet Union), and then, aggregation, the coming together of those units into something larger (think the European Union). A well-traveled, well-informed guide, Khanna makes persuasive use of pointed facts, surprising detail, and intriguing queries to demonstrate the degree of hyperconnectivity already upon us. Quick, can you say with any certainty where the car you drive was “made?” Did you know today’s most visited city is Dubai or that by 2025 over 40 cities will have populations of more than 10 million people? That China has only one aircraft carrier but maintains the world’s largest merchant marine fleet? That Canada’s water may be more valuable than oil in the 21st century? Khanna’s arguments range from a stout defense of the notion of “global citizens” to the futility of freezing today’s political map, the virtues of reciprocity over protectionism, and the degree of foreign investment between two nations as the strongest predictor of stable relations.
A consistently interesting, almost wholly persuasive vision of a future in which flow prevails over friction, where globalization’s new “scale, depth, and intensity” reshape the map we thought we knew.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8855-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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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