A solid work of acuity and breadth.
Kaplan (Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, 2010, etc.) sagely plots global territorial transformations from the United States to China.
The overthrow of artificial borders imposed by the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, postwar treaties and dictatorships has recalled this senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security back to some essential geopolitical truths. While not promoting geographical determinism, Kaplan reminds readers that to understand the role of geography is to understand a “historical logic” lost to our age of instant information and travel. For example, the recent democratic upheavals in the Arab world seized Tunisia first partly because it was early on the North African hub under numerous civilizations from the Carthaginians and the Romans to the Turks, while Yemen, with its stubborn terrain of mountains and desert, remained isolated and ungovernable. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Central Europe” has now replaced “Eastern Europe,” yet with the reunification of Germany, the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Balkans, and massive military intervention in ethnic struggles for self-determination in the 1990s, geography has been ignored to great peril. Kaplan returns to hard lessons by “realists” like Hans Morgenthau, who appealed to historical precedent rather than abstract moral principles in foreign policy; Nicholas J. Spykman, who reminded us that geography was permanent while dictators were not; and British geographer Halford J. Mackinder, who conceived the notion of the “Eurasian Heartland” as the area on which human settlement (and power) would always “pivot.” Kaplan extends his academic argument to the early-21st-century map and offers predictions on how the historical logic will play out in Europe, Russia, China, India, Iran and North America.
A solid work of acuity and breadth.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6983-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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
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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