A tiresome and tendentious book that destroys its own credibility through hyperbole and careless composition.
Confidently predicting nuclear annihilation and the worldwide destruction of civilization as we know it, Tor/Forge executive editor Gleason (End of Days, 2011, etc.) accuses American political leaders from both parties of treason.
“Future scholars may well argue,” writes the author, “that the most significant datum in U.S. history was that—for the sake of personal avarice—our politicians…traded with America’s nuclear enemies and helped bankroll the nation’s financial ruin and its nuclear destruction.” The author has become something of a professional enthusiast of the apocalypse, with a show on the History Channel, a novel featuring the destruction of the world, and now a hastily written and poorly edited broadside against the political establishment. While Gleason does bring to light how the United States has promoted the spread of nuclear power in dozens of countries, his unfocused approach makes it difficult to take seriously. The author conflates low-enriched uranium and highly enriched uranium throughout, though the two substances are radically different, a basic confusion which belies his self-proclaimed expert knowledge of proliferation. He refers to nuclear power plants as “nuclear bomb-fuel refineries,” and his estimate of the annual production of nuclear waste is dubious at best. Information boxes and bullet points on nearly every page are often only tangentially related to the subject at hand: Gleason rehashes the Bush dynasty’s well-known connections to companies that benefitted from the Nazi regime and describes the economic crisis as “A Detonating Debt-Bubble of Apocalyptic Proportions.” Gleason’s analysis of nuclear strategy and game theory has the feel of a quickly written undergraduate term paper. He muses, “Why India would want the ability to nuke the United States is a very strange conundrum,” and asserts that “Pakistan is so fearful of India, one could imagine that country nuking China, then trying to blame India.”
A tiresome and tendentious book that destroys its own credibility through hyperbole and careless composition.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3812-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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
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
PERSPECTIVES
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