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THE NEXT WAR

An imaginative and impassioned appeal from a former secretary of defense to reverse, or at least halt, ongoing cutbacks in US military budgets. With assistance from Schweizer (president of the James Madison Institute), Weinberger (who had a seven-year tour of duty in Ronald Reagan's cabinet) offers five engrossing, vivid (albeit fictive) accounts of the sort of wars America may be obliged to fight in the years ahead. His first pre-millennial belligerency pits the US against a reunification-minded North Korea in league with Communist China (which has an acquisition agenda of its own) during the spring of 1998. The next conflict brings America to deadly blows with an Iran bent on becoming the Middle East's dominant power via preemptive military strikes against its neighbors. Mexico, governed in 2003 by a radical regime that makes a hemisphere-threatening shambles of the domestic economy, becomes an opponent. Also on the enemies list is a revivified Russia whose ultranationalist president decides 2006 would be a very good year to start extending Slavic supremacy throughout Western Europe. Last but not least, America squares off against a Japan determined to recoup its flagging trade fortunes by reestablishing a Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere. Weinberger's worst-case scenarios afford crude but effective object lessons on the many ways in which US forces could be caught short (in terms of forward bases, manpower, missile defenses, intelligence resources, transport) in close encounters of the combative kind. And if not quite in a class with Tom Clancy or David Hagberg, his cautionary set pieces do pack a narrative punch. A savvy, stirring call to arms by an elder statesman who wants nothing more than to ensure that his country is prepared for whatever aggressions an uncertain future may hold. The text includes a hard-nosed foreword by Lady Margaret Thatcher.

Pub Date: Nov. 19, 1996

ISBN: 0-89526-447-1

Page Count: 496

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1996

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IN MY PLACE

From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992

ISBN: 0-374-17563-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

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