The blunt, score-settling recollections of an arms-control negotiator for five Presidents. A three-star general who fought in Italy, Korea, and Vietnam, Rowny was assigned to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks in 1973, largely at the behest of the late Senator Henry Jackson, who prized Rowny's fluency in Russian, familiarity with nuclear-deterrence theory—and hawkish concern with national security rather than unverifiable treaties. Once involved in the arcane trade, Rowny was effectively hooked, spending much of the eventful 17 years that followed at the bargaining table with hard-line envoys of the USSR (and, in many cases, the US State Department). In his opinionated, anecdotal retrospective, the author reprises the conflicts, domestic crises, summit meetings, and other geopolitical developments that helped determine the course of the struggle between the two superpowers. While Rowny looks back on efforts to close the Pandora's box of atomic weaponry, he offers candid, often arresting, comment on his superiors, colleagues, and opposite numbers. Reagan—whose peace-through-strength doctrine the author deems vindicated—comes off best. Nixon and Ford also fare well but Carter and Bush, along with a host of lesser lights (including Henry Kissinger), are accorded decidedly short shrift. Throughout, though, Rowny (who has no problem with self-esteem) delivers his typically harsh judgments with considerable humor. In summarizing prospects for reaching an agreement with his truculent USSR adversaries during the mid-70's, he notes: ``I knew the Soviets like their currency were simply not convertible.'' Finally, he cautions that, although the US ``won'' the cold war, the nation and its allies cannot afford to let their guard down. A memoir with an unyielding point of view and genuine bite.
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-881037-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
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
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