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to endure—while Britain and France are merely pawns, limited in the extension of their powers, still relying on old, outdated foreign policies.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
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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