A relentlessly upbeat forecast of China's future and the potential implications for the US. Private investment banker Burstein (Road Warriors, 1995, etc.) and de Keijzer, a business consultant involved in US-China business dealings, assess ``the impact that China will have on the global balance of wealth and power in the twenty-first century'' and are impressed. Their goal is to move discussion of the threats and opportunities China's growing economy will pose for American business in a more historically and culturally sensitive direction. Their motivation for this effort is straightforwardly reactive: A ``new anti-China vogue'' has infected American thinking and clouded judgments with groundless ideological biases. The excitement and optimism in the wake of Nixon's historic 1972 trip has been replaced by foreboding following the Tiananmen Square massacre, and hard-line perceptions of China have subsequently prevailed regarding issues as varied as human rights, Taiwan, and campaign finance. Burstein and de Keijzer argue that the government reaction to demonstrators in Tiananmen Square was not surprising given previous Chinese norms and that this incident shouldn't obscure the wide range of social and economic reforms that have taken place. We must stop trying to place China within preconceived Western notions and accept that it has a unique politico-economic system, what the authors term ``the Confucian social market.'' By avoiding misconstrual of Chinese intentions—the authors predict, for example, that China will continue a long-term historical pattern of both flexing its muscles within Asia and refraining from projecting its force throughout the world in an effort to become a global power—we will be able to recognize and take advantage of the opportunities its development will produce and sustain a peaceful, mutually beneficial relationship with China. Despite a tendency by the authors to become cheerleaders for China, this is a reasoned survey of truly significant issues. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-80316-X
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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