A sturdy deep dive into the Biden approach to international relations.
An examination of world affairs in the post-Trump years.
Ward, an award-winning journalist specializing in national security, notes that foreign policy played only a modest role in the 2016 election, and Trump limited himself to the lowbrow jingoism that delighted his followers: portraying dictators as admirable leaders who get things done and immigrants as threats to the nation. The author begins with a pertinent question: “How would Biden, a president who came of age in a time when America was the undisputed superpower, attempt to make it genuinely great again—respected and trusted by its allies, feared by its enemies, and no longer willing to kowtow to the despots that Trump seemed so enamored of?” When he took office, the new president and his administration focused on “foreign policy for the middle class,” negotiating a five-year extension of the nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia, thus making the world a little safer and suggesting the possibility of productive talks. Soon after, Biden was forced to confront the disastrous situation in Afghanistan. An advocate of reduced involvement in Afghanistan ever since his years as Obama’s vice president, he proceeded with the withdrawal. Despite 20 years and more than $1 trillion of assistance, few had confidence in the Afghan army, but U.S. intelligence determined that it could resist for several years. Few officials foresaw such a rapid collapse, and Ward’s cogent account of what followed makes for simultaneously illuminating and painful reading. But memories of foreign debacles are short, and the administration addressed another massive problem when intelligence officials determined, six months before it occurred, that Russia was preparing to invade Ukraine. Readers know what happened next, so Ward’s expert account of earnest diplomacy and consultation with allies lacks urgency, but history buffs will be fascinated nonetheless.
A sturdy deep dive into the Biden approach to international relations.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593539071
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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
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
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