An absolutely essential read for those concerned about the U.S. military, its purpose and its future.
A retired general offers his opinions on the state of America’s volunteer army and some suggestions for its future.
In this short but substantial book, former U.S. Army Gen. Laich delivers a detailed assessment of America’s all-volunteer force, elaborating on what led to its creation in 1973 and evaluating its performance since then—particularly as it’s waged two wars at once in Iraq and Afghanistan. His statistics are grim: Returning veterans are much more likely than civilians to commit suicide, abuse drugs and alcohol, and become homeless. He underscores the unfairness of the volunteer model, which fills the armed services with disproportionate numbers of lower-income people, leaving wealthier, better educated people underrepresented. He also decries the planning failures that led to the use of reservists and National Guard troops in combat despite their lack of readiness and to the redeployment of servicemen for combat tours after insufficient recovery time stateside. He clearly has no patience for the civilian and military leaders who’ve let these situations arise. However, Laich’s main point is that the AVF has failed because it was asked to conduct a protracted overseas war—something it was never intended to do. The author handles this complex subject with a firm hand, marshaling data effectively to prove his points and striving to maintain an objective approach throughout. He’s very direct about how the military, by its very structure, discourages the sort of creative thinking needed to push through necessary reforms. He also resists the temptation to expound on policy—specifically, the wisdom of waging particular wars in the first place—which gives him added credibility. He accepts that America will inevitably become involved in military conflicts overseas; he just wants those deployments to be fair, efficient and sustainable.
An absolutely essential read for those concerned about the U.S. military, its purpose and its future.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491703830
Page Count: 192
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2025 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.
