An authoritative overview of Pope Francis’ challenge to American hegemony.
A Roman Catholic journalist surveys the diplomatic agenda of Pope Francis in this political book.
Since the United States colonization of the Catholic-majority Philippines, writes Gaetan, the U.S.–Vatican relationship has been defined by “mutual skepticism between empires with deeply divergent worldviews.” Even when there have been moments of public cooperation, such as President Ronald Reagan’s partnership with Pope John Paul II in the Polish Solidarity movement, the Vatican’s refusal to “defer to the American view” of international relations has consistently defined their relationship. Even more than his predecessors, Pope Francis has vocally challenged America’s moral standing on issues that range from climate change and immigration to global finance and international arms deals. And though President Barack Obama’s relationship with the pontiff was “largely respectful,” the author describes a clandestine intelligence campaign spearheaded by the U.S. to discredit Jorge Bergoglio in the years preceding his becoming Pope Francis. But it was during President Donald Trump’s administration when Washington’s previously hushed critiques of the Vatican came to the fore. In particular, Senior Counselor to the President Steve Bannon (a paradoxical “thrice-divorced” traditional Catholic) launched a multimillion-dollar tour of European capitals and a right-wing media blitz to discredit Pope Francis. While the American establishment’s distrust of the Vatican is well covered in this engaging narrative, what makes this book special is its disclosure of the “behind-the-scenes” and “discreet” diplomatic actions of Pope Francis in China, Africa, and Eastern Europe that reveal the chasm of differences that exists between American and Vatican foreign policy. In a series of case studies of specific, 21st-century international conflicts, Gaetan convincingly demonstrates the pope’s keen diplomatic talents that effectively exploited “America’s loss of prestige” to pursue “alternative solutions” to world peace. As an international correspondent for the National Catholic Registerand contributor to Foreign Affairs, the author blends his expertise of geopolitics with access to the Vatican’s inner circles. This is an impressively well-researched book that features interviews with leading diplomatic insiders as well as information from the U.S. and Vatican archives. Though perhaps unnecessarily ad hominemin its barbs against the pope’s right-wing critics, this work delivers a superb analysis of his often unheralded diplomacy.
An authoritative overview of Pope Francis’ challenge to American hegemony.Pub Date: July 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5381-5014-6
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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