Despite its limitations, a serious and provocative Middle East assessment.
Using chess pieces, this political work analyzes the maddening complexity of the Middle East and America’s foreign policy regarding the region.
At the heart of Buonocore’s thoughtful and wide-ranging assessment of Middle Eastern politics is the game of chess as a metaphor: “The Middle East is a 3.5 million-square-mile chessboard.” Along these lines, the United States is the queen—the “all powerful, all reaching piece”—whose fate the entire game rests on. China and Russia are knights—“disruptive” and “nimble,” if limited in the reach of their powers. Turkey and Israel are bishops, the former more important than Saudi Arabia given its military might and the latter a nuclear power with the backing of the queen. Iran and Egypt are rooks—largely valuable because of their historical ability to endure—while Britain and France are merely pawns, limited in the extension of their powers, still relying on old, outdated foreign policies. The prohibitive restrictions of the illustrative schemata should be obvious, and the author freely admits his unsophisticated understanding of chess strategy. But his analysis is far more nuanced than his gimmicky employment of a metaphorical conceit—he admirably believes that answers lie “in the distant past.” Furthermore, while he contends the “end-state” for the region cannot yet be confidently surmised, he sees no way for the U.S. to safely withdraw: “Whether we like it or not, whether it suits political messaging or not, we are in it for the long run. Sustained engagement to build trust is the only way forward. The Queen has an appointment with the history of the Middle East, and it must keep that appointment.” Buonocore concedes his editor and some book critics call his writing style “verbose, flowery, arabesque, and prone to hyperboles” and say that he avoids “extensive details”—these are not minor failings. Still, he has considerable experience in the region, including as a reserve foreign area officer in the Navy, and that worldly background certainly shows in the depth of his analysis.
Despite its limitations, a serious and provocative Middle East assessment.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73585-350-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Notable Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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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