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
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: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
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