A survey of American diplomacy since the 1890s as reflected in the careers of the men who molded it.
Milne (Modern History/Univ. of East Anglia; America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War, 2008) chooses nine significant figures whose approaches to diplomacy—either as an art, with inexact methods, or as a science, with a logical approach built from first principles—define his thesis. The tale begins at a point when the country largely avoided foreign entanglements. Alfred Thayer Mahan, in a hugely influential book on the importance of sea power, argued that the U.S. must ready to take an international role to protect its interests. A generation later, Woodrow Wilson took the position that America could only be safe in a world at peace. America’s entry into World War I and the subsequent attempt to create the League of Nations were the results. Beginning in the 1920s, and increasingly as the Depression took its toll, Charles Beard made the case for putting domestic issues above all else. But with the rise of Hitler and Stalin, Walter Lippmann and George Kennan pushed for a more active international role, leading to the Cold War, in which Paul Nitze and Henry Kissinger took very different roles. As the Soviet Union faded, Paul Wolfowitz found new threats in the Middle East, threats that have dominated much of Barack Obama’s presidency. The overall arc of the book is fascinating, showing how the play of ideas and politics has worked out over more than a century, with some of the most critical episodes in modern history as main episodes in the plot. Milne doesn’t paint his protagonists in black-or-white terms; he both praises Kissinger for his role in the rapprochement with China and criticizes him for advocating for keeping the U.S. in Vietnam after it was clear there was nothing to gain there. On the whole, however, the author appears to side with the “artists” over their more dogmatic opposites.
A well-documented, full-scale overview of some key makers of modern history.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-29256-0
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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