A sharp, often effective brief against Bush that would be more convincing had Schlesinger not placed his historical...
With a jaundiced eye, octogenarian Schlesinger (A Life in the 20th Century, 2000, etc.) displays continuing zest for intellectual combat with seven historical essays on the war in Iraq, the Dubya administration, and the continuing American democratic experiment.
The Imperial Presidency (a phrase Schlesinger coined in the 1970s) has returned, he announces. The Bush II administration has reverted to the policy of unilateralism laid down by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but this time with a dangerous twist: preventive war. In other essays, Schlesinger delineates the long history of American dissent in wartime; lays out the possibility that a direct popular vote for President would lead to a free-for-all of third-party kooks and scoundrels; and considers the perils of misapplied history by politicians. Schlesinger piercingly underscores major flaws of this war: the denial of legal rights to Guantánamo Bay detainees, the lack of unerring intelligence data essential to a preventive war, and the lack of Arabic speakers at the State Department that has left us “eyeless in Iraq.” Nor has he lost his gift for the pungent comment (“Impeachment,” he notes, “is an extreme way of teaching presidents lessons”). But as court chronicler of Camelot, the author is reluctant to utter a syllable of praise for even a dead Republican. While attacking Bush for embarking on the Iraq war as a distraction from the necessary conflict with al-Qaeda, for instance, he doesn’t acknowledge that JFK embarked on his own sideshow—Vietnam—as a means of confronting Khrushchev after being bullied about Berlin at the Vienna summit. Friend and foe alike will find the historian’s arguments oddly familiar, e.g., “No administration since the Second World War has so systematically scorned the United Nations, defied the World Court, overrode the interests of allies, dismissed negotiation with adversaries.” Schlesinger on George W. Bush? No, on Ronald Reagan. Different circumstances, different actors, same script. In other words, the message sounds less like The Cycles of American History (the quote’s source) than recycled rhetoric.
A sharp, often effective brief against Bush that would be more convincing had Schlesinger not placed his historical objectivity in a blind trust.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-06002-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
© 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.
