“Humane war” may seem an oxymoron, but Moyn’s book will be of interest to war fighters and peacemakers alike.
A searching look at the rise of the “endless war” the U.S. is now waging.
“There is no single arc to the moral universe that guarantees that progress comes without regress on other fronts,” writes Yale Law School professor Moyn. The way in which contemporary war is fought, at least by American standards, has become increasingly “humane,” discounting the devastation it wreaks on identified enemies. Today, civilian populations suffer fewer casualties as targets are isolated and then hit with drones or Special Forces operations. The author contrasts this new approach to war with the conflicts in the last century, in which untold millions of civilians died, with cases in point being Vietnam and especially Korea, which, with good reason, Moyn considers “the most brutal war of the twentieth century, measured by the intensity of violence and per capita civilian death.” The author locates some of origins of the comparatively sanitized wars of the present in abolitionist and pacifist movements of the 19th century, although more interesting are the seeming contradictions he identifies in writers such as Carl von Clausewitz, who held that “the point of engagement is annihilation”—which would, oddly enough, then usher in peace. The contradictions remain: Making war a business of killer machines and a handful of highly trained soldiers does not necessarily make it any more just. However, Moyn notes, some of the present insistence on a more humane approach to fighting comes from our revulsion in the face of such horrors as Abu Ghraib and My Lai. Never mind that, as Moyn adds, humane war is also the product of what he calls “lawyerliness” on the part of the Obama administration, which sold the public on the idea that “his policies of endless and humane war, though not exactly what they had signed up for, were morally wholesome.”
“Humane war” may seem an oxymoron, but Moyn’s book will be of interest to war fighters and peacemakers alike.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-17370-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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
SEEN & HEARD
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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