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 Yorker staff 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
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
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