An excellent argument for the necessity of careful sifting of historical precedent and error.
A keen-eyed, sweeping survey of the depressingly familiar erroneous U.S. policy in the Middle East since the Balfour Declaration in 1917.
Wawro (Military History/Univ. of North Texas; The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–1871, 2003, etc.) asks some pointed questions about American policy in the Middle East, as he pursues these debacles chronologically, from the ignoring of Palestinian demands in the creation of Israel and being blind-sided by Cold War paranoia, to growing entanglement in nasty conflicts such as the Suez Crisis, Six-Day War, Yom Kippur War and Operation Desert Storm. “Did we attempt to repair the damage done by European imperialism, or merely settle into the wreckage in our own American way?” he asks. American support of Israel even in the face of outrageous aggression caused persistent snares in U.S.-Middle East relations for the next 50 years, creating Arab resentment, feeding nationalism and reorganizing the balance of power in the region. After the Suez Crisis, Britain and France were out, the U.S. and Soviet Union were in, and the so-called Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, pledging $200 million to combat communism in the region, prevailed. Nixon continually grappled with the Soviet threat to control Middle East oil sources via Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. With the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq saw its opportunity, and the internal combustions reverberated in the form of jihad, from Afghanistan to Pakistan to New York City. At this point American influence was in tatters. In addition to providing a thorough history of the region, Wawro pays close attention to the hotheaded reflexes of George W. Bush and his “Vulcans,” who “pushed ahead without even a nod to those important debates that had flared through the White House forty-five years earlier.”
An excellent argument for the necessity of careful sifting of historical precedent and error.Pub Date: April 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-59420-241-4
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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