An honest accounting by a patriot seeking “a deliberate national discourse on what actually makes America great.”
An American diplomat chronicles the joys and perils of her trade, working in Africa, and the many failures of U.S. foreign policy.
Shackelford may have spent less than a decade as a diplomat with the U.S. Foreign Service, but her tales about practicing diplomacy between the shifting priorities and alignments of the State Department and the White House are powerful—and terrifying—nonetheless. After an initial stint in Warsaw, she got her “dream assignment” in Juba, the capital and largest city in the newly independent Republic of South Sudan. “I wanted to be in Africa,” she writes. “I wanted to experience diplomacy on the front lines. I wanted to help a post-conflict country find stability and prosperity. I was naïve. I was looking for a real challenge, something unique. Juba was it.” Despite her inexperience, Shackelford’s compassion for the locals and dexterity in navigating the complexities of interfactional conflicts earned her pervasive respect—and later garnered the State Department’s highest award for consular work. The primary narrative thread is the bloody civil war between newly elected President Salva Kiir and his former vice president, Riek Machar. The author chronicles her desperate attempts to save civilians while drafting sharply worded cables urging the State Department to investigate war crimes. Between these disconcerting dispatches, Shackelford offers a condensed history of U.S. foreign policy that is nonpartisan but also painfully direct as well as pointed criticisms of the system under which she worked: “Could we have prevented war in 2013? Likely not. But we could have prevented our complicity, and mitigated the scale of suffering by championing our values and condemning human rights violations and anti-democratic actions.” The author also discusses her resignation after submitting a “dissent cable,” the last resort for any diplomat to push back against grievous misdeeds.
An honest accounting by a patriot seeking “a deliberate national discourse on what actually makes America great.”Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-2448-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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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