A clearly written prescription to help Americans alleviate their nation's malaise.
A retired four-star U.S. Army general and former Supreme Allied Commander Europe offers a manifesto for how his beloved nation can remain a world superpower without necessarily invading other nations.
Clark (Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire, 2003, etc.) is a global thinker about matters both military and civilian. In what sometimes comes across as a position paper for a presidential candidate, the author addresses how the United States can find its proper place in the global order before the next war limits the available options. “Today, the United States stands at a fateful crossroads,” writes the author. “After two decades as the world’s undisputed superpower, we are facing new realities at home and abroad, and it is time to rethink our role and set new objectives and priorities.” Clark examines a wide variety of issues, including constructive ways to combat the disruptions caused by terrorism; the importance of dependable cybersecurity so that governments working to better the lot of their citizens cannot be thwarted by hackers; how to shore up a fragile American financial system so that another massive economic collapse does not occur; the necessity of fully understanding the rise of Chinese military and economic power; and how to halt or at least slow down climate change. For the most part, the author is an upbeat advocate and writer, bringing his can-do military attitude to a set of problems away from the battlefield. Clark is forceful and confident in tone, but he also wisely acknowledges that he has relied on many advisers—after all, he notes, military leadership does not always translate well into running civilian governments, nor does it necessarily equate to effective diplomacy and economics.
A clearly written prescription to help Americans alleviate their nation's malaise.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1610394338
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
