Informative, though extraordinarily opinionated.
One-sided critique of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez argues that he poses a danger to the stability of the United States and world.
Democratic pollster Schoen (Declaring Independence: The Beginning of the End of the Two-Party System, 2008, etc.) and political consultant Rowan explore the personal and professional life of Chávez as a way of building their case that he is as much of a threat to the United States as Osama bin Laden. Chávez’s humble beginnings and career in the military fueled his resentment toward the powerful within Venezuela and their allies abroad, especially in the United States. Chávez found willing mentors who helped him rise through the ranks and forge alliances with Latin American leaders such as Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega. The Venezuelan president has used his nation’s large supply of oil as a weapon to gain influence and respect in places where he might otherwise be ignored, the authors note. His deals with Joseph Patrick Kennedy II, who runs a company that provides fuel to low-income residents in the Boston area, have prompted many American liberals to praise Chávez as a humanitarian. Schoen and Rowan contend it is all a ruse and that he wants nothing more than to destroy the United States. “With Hugo Chávez commanding the Venezuelan pipeline, America is facing an unprecedented and unrecognized threat,” they write. “When asked about the looming scythe over our heads, State Department officials merely shrug, though the U.S. military’s threat assessment rule is to analyze an adversary’s capabilities first and intentions second.” While many of the authors’ points are well taken, sensationalistic prose detracts from their effectiveness and at times gives this work the feel of a book-length version of an article in a tabloid or conservative-opinion journal. One of the main targets of Chávez’s ire, President Bush, is about to leave office, but the authors don’t discuss what impact the new administration will have on his actions toward the United States.
Informative, though extraordinarily opinionated.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9477-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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
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