An informative addition to the burgeoning field of leadership studies.
With John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage as a model, Jentleson (Public Policy and Political Science/Duke Univ.; American Foreign Policy: The Dynamics of Choice in the 21st Century, 2003, etc.) offers portraits of 18 transformative leaders who advanced international peace, justice, freedom, and human rights.
The author focuses on five significant areas in which these individuals achieved unprecedented change: managing major power rivalries (the United States–China rapprochement and the end of the Cold War), fostering international cooperation, reconciling politics of identity (in South Africa, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland), achieving freedom and human rights (in India, Poland, and Burma), and fostering global sustainability in health and the environment. He acknowledges that some of the individuals certainly have not always been admirable or morally exemplary. Henry Kissinger, for example, is included for his contributions to opening the relationship between the U.S. and China in the early 1970s despite his controversial political roles in other areas. Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has been condemned internationally for her apparent disregard of brutality against her nation’s Rohingya minority. Gandhi had “a peculiar and sometimes troubling attitude toward sex” and treated his wife and children cruelly. But Jentleson makes a persuasive case that his choices have demonstrated “actor indispensability,” applied to a leader who “acts significantly differently than another leader in the same situation would have acted.” He contrasts Woodrow Wilson’s unsuccessful efforts to found a League of Nations—a “prescriptively flawed” plan from an arrogant, racist, and politically clueless leader—with Franklin Roosevelt’s considerable “personal capital” and astute political skills that led to the founding of the United Nations. A few of Jentleson’s choices may be unfamiliar to most readers: Peter Benenson, for example, a charismatic, energetic British lawyer whose campaign to free two Portuguese political prisoners evolved into Amnesty International; and Gro Harlem Brundtland, three-time prime minister of Norway and director-general of the World Health Organization, whose Brundtland Commission made sustainability a global priority.
An informative addition to the burgeoning field of leadership studies.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-24956-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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