A trenchant and succinct depiction of the ongoing artful dodging of the nonagenarian statesman.
A focused examination of Henry Kissinger’s foreign policy as the normalization of “secrecy and spectacle,” from Southeast Asia to Chile to Iran to Iraq.
Grandin (History/New York Univ.; The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom and Deception in the New World, 2014, etc.) takes on what he considers the pernicious foreign policy legacy of Kissinger and his validation of the idea of perpetual need to “fight little wars in grey areas with resolve.” Unlike the “righteous indignation” of Christopher Hitchens’ The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001) or Seymour Hersh’s incomplete The Price of Power (1983), Grandin takes in the full sweep of American foreign policy under Kissinger’s “shadow” through the present-day quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have featured the same imperial arrogance that drove Kissinger’s highly secret Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia policy under President Richard Nixon. The hallmarks of Kissinger’s style, as formulated as early as his 1954 Harvard doctoral thesis, were ethical relativism, a championing of man’s freedom over cause and effect and a rejection of the Cold War policy of containment. Kissinger’s “alarmism” proved “a good career move,” as Grandin demonstrates in his chronicle of Kissinger’s early advising of Nelson Rockefeller and his leaking of information on the September 1968 Paris peace talks between Washington and Hanoi to the Nixon campaign camp (to keep Democratic rival Hubert Humphrey from gaining the upper hand), which allowed Kissinger into the inner circle of Nixon, who “anointed” him national security adviser. Creating Operation Menu, the ultrasecret bombing campaign of Cambodia (a sovereign, neutral country), followed by a ground invasion, created a siege mentality within government in the face of civil opposition and ferocious adherence to action at all cost. Grandin knowledgeably depicts how “Nixon’s tool” similarly polarized governments in Pakistan, Angola, Iran, Chile, and elsewhere.
A trenchant and succinct depiction of the ongoing artful dodging of the nonagenarian statesman.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-449-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PROFILES
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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