Essential reading for anyone concerned with America’s future on the world stage.
An eye-opening look at the state of strategic balance between the United States and its rivals, large and small.
Drawing on his experience in counterinsurgency both as an adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan and as a consultant in counterterrorism measures, Kilcullen (Global Security/Arizona State Univ.; Blood Year: The Unraveling of Western Counterterrorism, 2016, etc.) provides lessons on how America’s rivals have adjusted their strategies to effectively take on the global superpower. After the quick and overwhelming victory in the 1991 Gulf War, it became obvious that no conventional military force stood a chance against the sort of power the U.S. could unleash on the battlefield. At the same time, the Cold War was ending, and with it the threat of nuclear Armageddon—or so it seemed. That did not mean an end to challenges to American power, and as the Vietnam War had shown, there was more than one way to fight. Kilcullen looks at the strategies used by several adversaries, from the Islamic State group and Hezbollah to Iran and North Korea, which have achieved various degrees of success. In many ways, the most provocative parts of the book are the author’s discussions of Russian “liminal warfare,” which deploys a large array of tactics, pushing the boundaries to just short of battle. Equally challenging is the Chinese doctrine of “conceptual expansion,” which expands competition to include not only trade and economic warfare, but ecological, regulatory, and media warfare—and perhaps even smuggling and other criminal activities, many of which are deniable. A running theme is the idea of evolutionary change, as nations and nonstate actors adapt to the “fitness landscape” they inhabit. As Kilcullen points out, America’s adversaries have adapted more quickly than the U.S., and the result may well be the end of the American empire. The author delivers a detailed and unsettling analysis of how America’s rivals have adapted to the modern strategic landscape—and how they hope to defeat us.
Essential reading for anyone concerned with America’s future on the world stage.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-026568-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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
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
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