As a frontline player in Middle East policy, Simon provides a sweeping, detailed analysis of failures and successes.
According to this comprehensive account, when it comes to Middle East policy, good intentions count for nothing.
The entanglement of the U.S. in the Middle East goes back decades. Simon, who has worked in numerous key government roles related to foreign policy in the region, argues that despite the spending of huge amounts of blood and treasure, not much has been achieved. The chapters relate to presidential administrations, but the author often takes informative detours into the deeper history. Every president has started out with great aspirations, but each one has had to change course to accommodate shifting realities. Every country in the region has its own agenda and historic conflicts with neighbors, and their political systems are often dictatorial, unstable, and/or corrupt. For an external player to understand all of the factors involved is like trying to put together a jigsaw in a labyrinth of distorting mirrors. Simon threads his way through the chaos, noting the many agreements and treaties that have been meant to bring stability. Unfortunately, paper burns easily. In fact, American policy has seldom displayed a clear objective. Should the U.S. support Israel? Counter Soviet, and then Russian, influence? Build democratic governments? Tamp down the chronic violence? Protect sources of oil? All of these are relevant, which has meant that none has been very effective, and occasional, conditional successes have been offset by bloody failures. Simon sees the focus of U.S. foreign policy now moving toward Asia, with a growing realization that the idea of imposing a solution on the Middle East is a delusion. “A net assessment suggests that the United States would have been better off today if it had not been so eager to intervene in the Middle East,” says Simon. “Fortunately, America’s era there is drawing to a close, and probably not a moment too soon.”
As a frontline player in Middle East policy, Simon provides a sweeping, detailed analysis of failures and successes.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780735224247
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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