An illuminating if unsettling account of what it takes to run “the largest and most complex organization in the entire...
The former secretary of defense delivers a lucid explanation of how the Department of Defense operates.
A theoretical physicist who became interested in international affairs, Carter (Director/Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs; Keeping the Edge: Managing Defense for the Future, 2001, etc.) entered government service in 1993 as President Bill Clinton’s assistant secretary of defense for international security policy and eventually became President Barack Obama’s secretary of defense in 2015. Specializing in international security, nuclear policy, and weapons procurement, the author considers himself a technocrat rather than a political operative. Though he was first appointed by a Democrat and was never appointed by a Republican, he accomplishes the impressive feat of soothing conservatives by emphasizing that private enterprise is the most efficient source of our military’s goods and services. “Business is business,” he writes, “and if they are to succeed…they need to mind their bottom lines. The taxpayer shares an interest in their viability.” Carter also soothes liberals by agreeing that, absent strict government oversight, companies pad their profits, drag their feet, and have no objection to bribery if it is deemed useful. Even out of office, he provided expertise to all administrations and remained on good terms with even highly conservative leaders. His evaluation of all presidents since Ronald Reagan is never less than mildly favorable, with one exception that will surprise few readers. His major criticism of Donald Trump is that he despises experts who disagree with him. Readers will squirm to learn the difficulties of keeping our nation secure, which, even in the good old days, was hobbled as much as helped by members of Congress who gave their own interests priority over the nation’s and journalists who preferred scandal to substance. Today, with Congress nearly paralyzed and journalism dumbed down by the internet, it’s even more difficult.
An illuminating if unsettling account of what it takes to run “the largest and most complex organization in the entire world.”Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4391-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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