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 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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
