Alarmist at points, but an alarm all policymakers, military planners, and students of international affairs should heed.
A warning on the geopolitical front: Forget about the Islamic State group. It’s the rising superpower of China, and probably Russia, that the U.S. will be fighting in the future.
Brose, former policy adviser to John McCain and staff director for the Senate Armed Services Committee, doesn’t mince words: War drives military adaptation, and “many of the ways in which the US military has innovated and changed in recent years have only happened because it has been at war.” Yet the enemy, by his account, has been misidentified. Our military has been developing expensive platforms, with hardware favored over software (and software rapidly rendered obsolete in the bargain), that are directed at nonstate targets such as IS and the Taliban when the real enemies are various people’s republics. The People’s Liberation Army of China, Brose writes, has a highly evolved understanding of the “kill chain,” military parlance for the process of intelligence gathering and decision-making that can end—but doesn’t have to—in actual fighting. “We have been building our military to project power and fight offensively for decades,” he argues, “while China has invested considerably in precision kill chains to counter the ability of the United States to project military power.” Send a fleet to the South China Sea, in other words, and China will await with highly developed aircraft carrier–killing missiles; meanwhile, Chinese hackers are targeting American infrastructure and satellite systems. It will come as no surprise, given Brose’s ties to McCain, that Donald Trump comes in for a drubbing for not understanding any of this. His spending priorities are all wrong, writes the author, while his war with Jeff Bezos compromises the military’s development of cloud-based AI, and the many vacancies in the chain of command mean that nothing is getting done in the Pentagon, “which really means falling behind.” The likely outcome? A world dominated by our one-time Cold War enemies.
Alarmist at points, but an alarm all policymakers, military planners, and students of international affairs should heed.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-53353-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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