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
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
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