An appraisal of armed conflict that will strike most readers as a typically slick Alvin Toffler production—despite the byline given to wife Heidi and the bulletin that Alvin wrote Future Shock, The Third Wave, and other bestsellers with her help. Here, the authors offer a quickstep guide to warfare in the idiosyncratic context of their wave theory—which, broadly speaking, divides world history into agrarian, industrial, and technological eras. Starting with the hand-to-hand combat of ancient times, they eventually get to WW II's high-explosive and nuclear horrors. Desert Storm, the Tofflers argue, was a showcase for a new generation of intelligent armament (smart bombs and the like) that promises to minimize if not eliminate the importance of brute-force firepower and set-piece battles. Among other examples, the authors cite the possibility of microrobots able to invade an adversary's headquarters, programmable ordnance, and sonic systems that could disable enemy troops without killing them. In the meantime, the Tofflers warn, the breakup of the USSR hasn't made a peaceable kingdom of the Global Village. Indeed, they assert, more rather than fewer brushfire wars are likely to break out, owing to economic and ethnic rivalries, political demagoguery, religious fanaticism, the erosion of nation-states' sovereignty, and allied causes. Worse yet, unstable regimes in backward lands have easy access to state-of-the-art biological, chemical, and other weapons, including missile-delivery systems. Given the high-tech dangers of a small planet, the Tofflers conclude, reasonably enough, that it would be a fine idea for Western leaders and their counterparts in less-favored climes to devise innovative ways to give peace a chance. Worst-case scenarios that afford fans of the doomsday genre a multiple choice of bang-or-whimper endings for a weary world.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-316-85024-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
A heartfelt if somewhat unsurprising view of old age by the former president. Carter (Living Faith, 1996, etc.) succinctly evaluates the evolution and current status of federal policies concerning the elderly (including a balanced appraisal of the difficulties facing the Social Security system). He also meditates, while drawing heavily on autobiographical anecdotes, on the possibilities for exploration and intellectual and spiritual growth in old age. There are few lightning bolts to dazzle in his prescriptions (cultivate family ties; pursue the restorative pleasures of hobbies and socially minded activities). Yet the warmth and frankness of Carter’s remarks prove disarming. Given its brevity, the work is more of a call to senior citizens to reconsider how best to live life than it is a guide to any of the details involved.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-345-42592-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
© 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.
