By distinguished diplomat and Cold War policy architect Kennan (At the Century's Ending, 1996, etc.) with some input from historian Lukacs (The End of the Twentieth Century, 1993), some brief ruminations on the evolution of America's containment policy in the early years of the Cold War. Americans regarded the Soviet Union in 1945 as the principal ally of the US, by 1947 as its principal opponent. In this correspondence from 1994 and 1995, Kennan, theorist of the policy of containment of Soviet Communism that marked the foreign policies of nine US presidents from 1945 to 1989, explains how US reaction to its erstwhile ally evolved rapidly from unease to active opposition. In February 1946 Kennan, then a subordinate diplomat in the American embassy in Moscow, received a routine request from the Treasury Department for an opinion on Soviet intransigence about the World Bank. His response was the Long Telegram, an historic 8,000-word document that offered a coherent explication of the ``Kremlin's neurotic view of world affairs'' and advocated the use of the ``logic of force'' in response to Soviet aggression. Sixteen months later, Kennan published a seminal article in Foreign Affairs magazine that laid out his simple philosophy of containment: Soviet aggression should be opposed whenever encountered. Kennan explains how his thinking behind the Long Telegram and the article developed from a wartime study of the ruthless, paranoid Stalin regime. And he argues here that if the true nature of life in Russia, and the pragmatic necessity of Soviet-American cooperation during the war, had been explained properly to the American people, many misunderstandings and distortions in that relationship could have been avoided. In particular, Kennan contends, there might have been less of the unjustified tendency of each side to ascribe to the other a desire to dominate Europe through military means. A simple but illuminating exposition.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8262-1108-9
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A memorable report of a monthlong 1992 expedition to Peru, featuring daring, drugs, and despotism. BBC reporter Simpson (Despatches from the Barricades, 1991) loves a good story, and Peru—source of most of the world's cocaine and home of both the relentless Shining Path guerrilla movement and an army unburdened by procedural niceties—seemed like a natural place to find one. He planned, with a group of colleagues, to cover the drug problem and the political situation for the BBC and other news organizations. But before describing this trip he whets readers' appetites with engaging preliminary tales of a trip from Brazil to visit forest-dwelling Indians and his subsequent negotiations from London over the logistics of the Peruvian trip. Arrived in Lima, Simpson and his team learn that the Peruvian police have captured Shining Path leader Abimael Guzman. Simpson's interviews show the manhunt leader to be one of the government's few committed democrats, while President Alberto Fujimori, who has suspended the constitution, wriggles out of tough questions. Navigating Peru's coca-growing region, an area off-limits to foreigners, Simpson's team, aided by a brave Peruvian journalist and some rickety forms of transport, has several adventures: They take testimony about army human-rights violations, meet a former official willing to testify about army corruption, and escape some menacing local army potentates, whom they manage to film before fleeing. Amid the tension, there is macabre humor, as when a Peruvian journalist composes for Simpson a fawning letter asking to interview a local drug lord (``Our news...has 99 per cent credibility among the people of Europe''). Simpson leaves Peru after getting the country's vice president, Maximo San Roman, on camera calling Fujimori ``the front man'' for a regime linked with drug traffickers. A good yarn with an appealing protagonist that inspires sadness for the Peruvian people and much distaste for their government. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43297-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An angry, impassioned book from a journalist who has seen the Bosnian conflict at its worst. Vulliamy has been covering the war in the former Yugoslavia for the Guardian, winning several awards for his reportage, much of which has gone into this volume. After a pungent historical summary of the troubled nationalities that make up the population of former Yugoslavia, Vulliamy plunges readers headlong into a nightmarish war in which 85% of the dead are civilians, a war stained by concentration camps and genocidal violence. He describes a conflict in which a multiethnic Bosnian state has been caught in a territorial vise between two vicious and unprincipled neofascist states, one Croatian and one Serb; both, he says, are rabidly nationalistic and want to ``re-establish their ancient frontiers with modern weaponry in the chaos of post-communist eastern Europe.'' He describes formerly Muslim villages now ``gutted, charred and lifeless''; concentration camps full of men with skeletal bodies, ``alive, but decomposed, debased, degraded.'' Vulliamy harshly criticizes diplomatic cynicism, referring to the behavior of the European Community, the Russians, and the US as nothing less than a Munich-scale appeasement that has allowed the Serbs and Croats to blackmail, lie, and wheedle their way toward the dismemberment of Bosnia. He makes no effort to hide his distaste for the politicians who engendered the butchery or the diplomats who made it possible. The reporting and the writing are comprehensive and moving, and it is hard to imagine anyone coming away from this volume not feeling enraged and dismayed by events in Bosnia. If readers are seeking an objective and detached history of this conflict, this is the wrong book. However, it is one of the best books to date on the Bosnian tragedy. A powerful and important volume.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11378-1
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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