A sweeping, deeply researched account that will gratify specialists and nonspecialists alike.
Comprehensive history of the longest armed conflict in U.S. history.
In his third book, Oxford-trained historian and former State Department official Malkasian gives the most thorough account of the war in Afghanistan to date. Spanning more than 18 years and three American presidents—George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump—the conflict is now winding down, but in a way that many find disappointing. In the first three chapters, he lays the scene of Afghan culture and society. Malkasian argues that America’s war in Afghanistan is part of the broader upheaval sparked by the Soviet-Afghan War, begun in 1978 and fought between Soviet-backed Communists who took power in a coup and the resistance fighters to whom the U.S. supplied over $1 billion in funds and arms as part of Cold War containment. In the middle chapters, Malkasian gives a blow-by-blow of American phases of the war, beginning with the period from the initial invasion after 9/11 through the 2003 Iraq War. Then came the 2006 Taliban offensive that triggered the troop surge of 2007. The author gives the most detailed coverage to Obama’s surge, which included 140,000 troops (compared to Bush’s 30,000) and was marked by various resets and reallocations. Malkasian focuses on the southern province of Helmand, where he spent nearly two years as a civilian adviser. In the final chapters, the author looks at Trump’s drawdown and the 2019-2020 peace talks. Malkasian is clear on why those talks succeeded: “It is not the battlefield stalemate or diplomatic prowess. It is Donald Trump….More than other any other US politician, he was willing to buck criticism and demand that the United States leave.” Perhaps the war wouldn’t have been so costly if this had happened sooner, but Malkasian concedes that there was never an easy way out. Mismanagement, tribalism, and refusals to leave have all fed “the combat experience of a generation of US servicemen and women.” For the Afghan people, the experience has been nothing short of catastrophic.
A sweeping, deeply researched account that will gratify specialists and nonspecialists alike.Pub Date: July 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-19-755077-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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