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 smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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