A well-placed critique of both an inept presidency and an uncritical media.
The award-winning British journalist analyzes and criticizes Donald Trump’s handling of wars in the Middle East and Asia.
Independent Middle East correspondent Cockburn opens as he closes, with an account of the assassination of Iranian military strategist and supposed terrorist Qasem Soleimani, which was followed by a declaration that the Islamic State had been defeated and by the abandonment of America’s Kurdish allies in Syria. The author considers Soleimani less a threat than the administration believed, though his killing provided a convenient martyr around whom Iran could plant a flag. There’s a schizophrenia at play here; writes Cockburn, “the US has always been keen to hide the degree to which it has been Iran’s de facto partner, as well as its rival, ever since Saddam Hussein…invaded Kuwait in 1990.” Many of Trump’s moves seem calculated to improve Iran’s standing in the region: “It does not take very much to destabilize Iraq and the signs are that Trump does not care if he does.” IS seems to be flourishing, mounting attacks on peace demonstrators in Turkey, blowing up a Moscow-bound airliner, attacking a mosque in Egypt, and detonating a suicide bomb beside a Pakistani polling place—“not to mention,” adds Cockburn, “the eight killed in the UK in 2017 after a van drove into pedestrians on London Bridge.” Cockburn gives Trump some credit for attempting to project American power less with military strength than with “commercial and economic” blandishments. He further reserves some of his critical asperity for journalists who are too willing to accept party lines, though he allows that a reporter in the field lacks the clout of the suits back home: “Usually, it is…the home office or media herd instinct that decides the story of the day.” Even so, his own reporting on the ground, interwoven into his narrative, proves the power of a well-informed and serious pen.
A well-placed critique of both an inept presidency and an uncritical media.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-83976-040-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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