Deeply insightful advice for the coming decades.
A thorough investigation of “America’s top foreign policy challenge.”
One of the most significant geopolitical trends is the explosive growth of China. With assistance from Graff, Alperovitch, entrepreneur, cybersecurity expert, and founding member of the U.S. government’s Cyber Safety Review Board, warns that America is now engaged in “Cold War II” with a nation far more populous and efficient than the former Soviet Union —and just as skilled at bending the rules. The author begins with a fictional scenario describing China’s conquest of Taiwan in 2028. Most readers know that this is a long-standing Chinese obsession, but Alperovitch emphasizes that it would be a massive geopolitical triumph, assuring domination of the South China Sea and access to one of the world’s most valuable resources: computer chips. “Taiwan alone is responsible for nearly 40 percent of new computing power manufactured every year worldwide,” writes the author, adding that the Chinese are as productive, hardworking, and imaginative as Americans—and there are four times as many of them. Beijing’s goal of becoming the world’s top superpower seems inevitable unless U.S. officials act decisively. “To succeed over the next half century,” writes Alperovitch, the U.S. “needs to prioritize two broad enablers of innovation—semiconductor chips and immigration.” Regarding the latter, the author echoes other observers in his demonstration of how the U.S. discourages even skilled legal immigrants, a significant problem. Giving computer chips so much emphasis seems a stretch, but the author makes a convincing case that they are today’s primary engines of progress. Eschewing the usual homilies about freedom, the author urges America to pay more attention to traditional allies as well as China’s neighbors. “Other countries do not need to love us…and most of them…never will,” he writes. “But as long as they hate China more, they may prefer to partner with us.”
Deeply insightful advice for the coming decades.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781541704091
Page Count: 400
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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