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 fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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