A chronological, straightforward, occasionally disturbing history of the challenges leading to the current morass.
A Middle East adviser recounts the role of the United States in the region over the past three decades.
Former ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations, Khalilzad chronicles a long career in international politics. Born in Afghanistan, the author came to America in 1966 as a high school exchange student. Although he first experienced culture shock—he had never seen a shower or an elevator—he quickly acclimated and later leapt at the chance to do graduate work at the University of Chicago. Middle East politics became his field of expertise, and he was pursuing an academic career at Columbia University when the Jimmy Carter administration tapped him to become an adviser on Afghanistan. In 1986, he joined the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under Ronald Reagan. During the George H.W. Bush administration, Khalilzad left government to work at the RAND Corporation, helping to establish a center for Middle East policy studies during his eight-year tenure. Most of this revealing memoir concerns the George W. Bush administration, in which the author worked beginning in May 2001. The author acknowledges the “steep learning curve” facing that administration; no one on the foreign policy team “had a feel for the histories, cultures, and emotions that drove the politics of the broader Muslim world.” Khalilzad portrays Bush and Condoleezza Rice as articulate and thoughtful, but he frequently became frustrated by Donald Rumsfeld and by the power struggles among officials at the Pentagon and State Department. In formulating policy for Afghanistan, which was devastated by the Soviet-Afghan War, Khalilzad advised intervention to rebuild the country’s institutions to prevent its alignment with extremists. “Afghanistan was our first critical test,” he writes, but there, and in Iraq, rivalries, corruption, and a weak sense of civic responsibility, coupled with inconsistent American policy, undermined progress and stability. Critical of Barack Obama, the author advises a strong military presence as the U.S. promotes democratic ideals.
A chronological, straightforward, occasionally disturbing history of the challenges leading to the current morass.Pub Date: March 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08300-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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