An informative and engaging but ultimately unsatisfying look at a bygone era of American soft power abroad.
A veteran of the organization recounts life at USAID and in American international development more broadly.
Drawing on nearly three decades of service, Brown paints a colorful portrait of the United States Agency for International Development from an insider’s privileged perspective. After an 11-year stint practicing commercial law, the author joined the Agency in 1987 and served in various capacities through 2009—a momentous span of history that included revolutions in the Middle East, coups in Central America and Africa, and the fall of the Soviet Union. Brown begins with a few critical pages explaining the structure and impact of USAID, noting its longevity, size, and scope. The lists of specific programs and their impacts are particularly revealing in their breadth, depth, and occasionally, surprise; numerous agricultural products from across the Americas, for instance, are available in United States grocery stores not because of vague market forces or savvy businesspeople but because USAID invested in agriculture and trade guided by specific objectives and strategies. The bulk of the text is an account of Brown’s career as he moved from country to country, including Haiti and the Dominican Republic (and places farther afield like Kenya, Madagascar, and Kyrgyzstan as a Foreign Service professional). The author provides detailed descriptions of each location’s layout, climate, culture, and, often, the colonial heritage from which each nation is struggling to emerge (“The memory of genocide remains relevant to ethnic identity in independent Namibia”). The text is varied and informative; Brown clearly explains what USAID does and why. However, he runs into some problems common to memoirs, struggling to tell a story with a large chronological span and to convey bigger ideas through human-sized moments. Often, significant events (a coup required diplomatic staff to hunker in place for a week eating nothing but rice and cabbage) are afforded as much space on the page as insignificant ones (getting stuck in an airport waiting area for six hours). The result is more a quirky travel memoir than a sustained look at USAID and the international development space.
An informative and engaging but ultimately unsatisfying look at a bygone era of American soft power abroad.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9781967458912
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Mindstir Media
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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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