An impressive survey that takes stock of unimaginable peril.
A world of dangers.
This comprehensive history meticulously details the process that keeps the nuclear balance in place and has prevented world annihilation. A Stanford University historian and author of Stalin and the Bomb (1994), Holloway has examined mountains of documents (the citation list runs more than 100 pages) beginning in the 1940s, before the first and only use of nuclear weapons, to the present day. While nuclear weapons have not been used in war since 1945, the threat of their deployment has shaped military history and international politics for decades. At the end of World War II, only one country, the U.S., possessed nuclear weapons; today, there are nine countries known to have them, with a global stockpile of about 13,000 weapons in various hands. That number is down from a peak of roughly 60,000 weapons, thanks to treaties. Holloway takes readers through brinksmanship (the Cuban missile crisis), resolution (President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev), global antinuclear movements, nonproliferation agreements, deterrence, strategic defense, and nuclear saber-rattling. From atomic weapons’ earliest days, it was clear that international control over their development, deployment, and use would be unlikely, if not impossible, because the policies and actions of individual countries would prevail in any situation. Leaders around the world saw and continue to see the atomic bomb not merely as a military weapon, but as an important source of political influence. Maintaining the delicate nuclear balance has so far been achieved by the “unacceptability of nuclear war”—the “nuclear taboo.” Holloway stresses that a nuclear war is unwinnable. “Nuclear-weapon states have made threats to use nuclear weapons, but is it not transgressive to advocate violating a taboo? Is that permissible as part of deterrence, which allows us to threaten terrible things in order not to have to carry them out?”
An impressive survey that takes stock of unimaginable peril.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780300229448
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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