An important chronicle of a modern Southeast Asian crisis.
An official with the World Bank reflects on her experiences in Myanmar in this debut memoir.
Aung San Suu Kyi is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and was, until 2010, one of the world’s most widely known political prisoners before leading Myanmar as it shifted into democracy. Later, however, she became the target of criticism as the Myanmar military pursued a campaign of genocide against the country’s Muslim Rohingya population. This memoir, written by a former country director of the World Bank who knew Suu Kyi personally and worked with her administration in allocating billions of dollars to alleviate poverty, offers a firsthand look at the paradoxes of Myanmar’s nascent democracy. When Goldstein first arrived in the Southeast Asian nation in 2017 as a high-level World Bank representative, she believed that Suu Kyi “embodied everything we were trying to do there.” The book documents the author’s reaction to the horrors of the Rohingya genocide, and it blends her reflections on recent Myanmar history with an account of her own life as a Jewish girl who experienced antisemitism growing up in the American Midwest. Goldstein defied gender norms, rising through the ranks of a male-dominated organization. Over more than 60 chapters, the author offers poignant vignettes that provide a portrait of the international community’s realization of the moral failures of a humanitarian icon. Although the book, which is dedicated to those “fighting for human rights, rule of law, and true democracy in Myanmar,” offers a gripping story, its best passages are reflective in nature. One chapter, for instance, finds Goldstein questioning if the “good things” she helped facilitate (“The children educated, the babies vaccinated, the villages electrified”) were sufficient or “devastatingly too little.” Scholars of international relations will be drawn to the insights of a high-ranking global bureaucrat, but the book offers ample historical context and accessible prose to satisfy readers of all backgrounds.
An important chronicle of a modern Southeast Asian crisis.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Ballast Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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SEEN & HEARD
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