“We hope this book provides the material to understand what happened and why,” the authors conclude. Mission accomplished.
A revealing look at U.S.–China trade relations during the Trump administration.
In December 2018, an informal poll of 75 corporate executives attending a Washington, D.C., conference showed that roughly 50% believed that, in light of recent trade history, the U.S. and China would be at war within 30 years. Davis, a Pulitzer-winning senior editor at the Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau, and Wei, who works at the Journal’s Beijing bureau, depict this “romance gone bad” by focusing on the first three years of the Trump administration. According to the authors, a series of miscalculations and misunderstandings on both sides have brought the two nations to the current impasse. Chinese President Xi Jinping has failed to appreciate how his government’s subsidization of private companies and implausible denials of technological theft have alienated American officials. As for Donald Trump, the authors persuasively argue that his protectionist policies vis-à-vis China have achieved mixed results at best. Yet Trump “deserves credit for challenging the easy assumptions about China that had guided American policy since at least the Clinton administration,” particularly the idea that economic engagement would lead to political liberalization. General readers may be forgiven for skimming the more detailed passages, which depict the seemingly endless series of trade talks and controversies. Yet the authors skillfully enliven what could have been a dull narrative. Particularly diverting are the biographical sketches of the participants in the trade talks—including that of Peter Navarro, the profane hard-line economist in Trump’s administration—and a number of illuminating anecdotes and facts. China, for example, had the world’s largest economy “until roughly the U.S. Civil War,” and the Chinese refer to those who return home after working overseas as “hai gui,” or “sea turtles.”
“We hope this book provides the material to understand what happened and why,” the authors conclude. Mission accomplished.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-295305-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper Business
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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