A lucid but overly general discussion of leadership that lacks practical details.
A physician and researcher focuses on the need and means to create global leaders of moral integrity in this ambitious book.
According to Khan, the world is spiraling into poverty and war and the principal culprit is a failure of global leadership. The crux of this problem is moral in character—without the direction provided by “transcendent principles,” leaders are inclined to “selfishness, cruelty, egoism, and hysteria.” The moral order of the cosmos is guaranteed by a “universal organizing principle,” which one can, as the author does, refer to as God. Khan proposes that moral integrity could be spread through a program that identifies potential leaders in their youth and subjects them to a training regimen. This would require the establishment of a kind of global accreditation agency to compose the standards and oversee their implementation, an Independent Global Leadership Organization. Khan’s discussion is characteristically vague—he doesn’t provide a lot of actionable details regarding the nature of the selection of leaders or their training. In addition, he doesn’t examine the challenges of any test for leadership being globally accepted or enforced given thorny issues like political diversity and sovereignty. Even his understanding of a leader’s essential characteristics is unhelpfully broad—patience, open-mindedness, and compassion are inarguably good traits, but surely leadership requires much more than these attributes. The author is admirably open about his own religious commitments—he’s a practicing Muslim—and tries to articulate a message that could be generally palatable to theists of all stripes. Moreover, he writes in consistently clear prose unencumbered by technical jargon. But his suggestions are not only indeterminate, but also a bit naïve—the creation of moral leaders is not a simple matter of technocratic training. Ultimately, this is a peculiarly apolitical book given that the author’s mission is to improve the messy political world.
A lucid but overly general discussion of leadership that lacks practical details.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4808-9366-5
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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
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BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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