From a knowledgeable guide, a thoughtful study of the pattern of violence and response.
A chronological, historical walk-through of successive waves of al-Qaeda terrorism from 1998 to the present.
What has caused the three surges in terrorist activity over the past decade-plus, and can the next one be predicted? RAND analyst Jones (In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan, 2009, etc.) fashions a complete tutorial in the rise of violent jihadism, which emerged from the struggle against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1980s. The organization’s early leaders had competing visions about its mission that created enormous tension. Chief Egyptian idealogue Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, author of the seminal Primer in Preparing for Jihad, warned against taking the violent campaign against the Egyptian government and asserted that the terrorist tactics “grossly misinterpreted Islam.” His deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri became increasingly militant, joining with other groups and turning the struggle outward to the corrupting influence of the West on Islam. In 1998, al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden and others published a fatwa to kill Americans, yet it wasn’t until the simultaneous attacks on U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that the U.S. finally took full notice. Jones tracks the American response—e.g., by CIA officials Henry Crumpton and Philip Mudd, as the first wave of violence crested with 9/11. The author ably organizes all the pieces of the puzzle regarding successive terrorist attacks, fleshing out the numerous personalities involved, tracking the U.S. and British response and decade-long hunt for bin Laden and establishing excellent perspective on the amorphous nature of the enemy and the dissention from within. In preventing a next wave of terrorism, Jones propounds exploiting al-Qaeda's tendency to kill civilians as a way of eliciting backlash against the group.
From a knowledgeable guide, a thoughtful study of the pattern of violence and response.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-08145-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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