An informative, persuasive look at the current state of Chinese-American relations.
Wang (The United States and China Since World War II, 2013, etc.) offers an analysis of Obama’s China policy and the continuing points of contention in the Chinese-American relationship.
A number of recent economic trends in both the United States and China brought about a new era in the historically wary relationship between the two nations. As Wang outlines early in his book, “China has become more assertive of its ‘core interests’ but has been slow to adopt what America views as its international obligations. Meanwhile, America’s vulnerability after the financial crisis, coupled with the specter of an ambitious China, has made U.S. policymakers eager to stake out America’s position vis-à-vis China.” While the fraught security relationship between the nations is, in some ways, reminiscent of that between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the U.S. and China have highly connected economies that make for a state of codependence. Wang outlines the way President Obama has navigated this simultaneously antagonistic and symbiotic relationship. While Obama’s strategy is believed to be one of both deterrence and reassurance, Wang feels that the balance has shifted toward deterrence and that this, in turn, has put China on the defensive. After a brief history of the evolving relationship, Wang breaks down the major Chinese-U.S. happenings since Obama took office, followed by an analysis of the major Chinese-U.S. issues. Wang also offers a look into how U.S. policies are perceived in China, a perspective that isn’t often considered in the Western media. Wang’s highly accessible prose is geared toward readers with little background in Chinese-U.S. diplomacy. His focus on the Obama administration offers a manageable entry into the situation and reveals a policy that may surprise those who haven’t been paying attention. Wang includes a deep bibliography of interviews, studies, and statements by the Obama administration; readers interested in the repercussions of an emergent China and the way it’s shaping American policy will come away with a solid understanding of the players, issues, and stakes.
An informative, persuasive look at the current state of Chinese-American relations.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4724-4442-4
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Ashgate
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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