A sure-handed historical review with an engaging viewpoint.
Brown (Emeritus, Politics/Oxford Univ.; The Rise and Fall of Communism, 2009, etc.) addresses an apparent paradox in attitudes about political leaders.
While people are presumed to prefer strong leaders, the author contends that leaders who attempt to appear overtly strong are actually less effective than more self-effacing ones. By the “strong leader” of the title, Brown means leaders who seize the responsibility for decision-making in all spheres of government, without deferring to colleagues with greater expertise in their areas of responsibility. Such leaders are essential to some authoritarian regimes, such as the fascist states of the 1930s or the "cult of personality" communist states like Russia under Stalin or North Korea today, but they appear in democracies as well, usually with unfortunate results. Regardless of the form of government, Brown argues that while the man on the white horse may cut the most striking figure, he is more likely to make faulty decisions on his own than will someone who governs through persuasion and consensus. The author therefore deplores the tendency for presidents or premiers to take personal credit for achievements properly attributable to their party or government—he is particularly hard on Tony Blair in this regard—and of media to emphasize the influence of these leaders at the expense of other senior ministers. Accessible if somewhat dry in tone, this wide-ranging survey of regimes from the early 20th century to the present illuminates the author’s thesis by contrasting the governing styles of a host of such leaders as Mao Zedong and Margaret Thatcher, on the one hand, with those of Deng Xiaoping and Clement Attlee on the other. Occasionally, it seems that Brown was torn between writing solely to press his point about effective leadership and producing a scholarly and thus more inclusive survey of political leadership styles and results regardless of their relevance to his overall theme.
A sure-handed historical review with an engaging viewpoint.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-465-02766-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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
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
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