Students of recent world history and of American power, hard and soft, will find this an endlessly fascinating study of...
The riveting life of a deeply flawed diplomat whose chief shortcoming seems to have been the need to be more recognized than he was.
New Yorker staff writer Packer (The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, 2013, etc.), winner of the National Book Award, was a friend of the diplomat and foreign policy specialist Richard Holbrooke (1941-2010), one of whose signal accomplishments was navigating through the endless difficulties of Balkan ethnic politics to negotiate peace in the former Yugoslavia. When it came to national interest versus universal principles of human rights and the like, “Holbrooke favored the former while making gestures toward the latter.” Still, faced with the ugly realities of such things as the Cambodian genocide, which, as one of the “best and the brightest” of the American technocrats in Vietnam, he bore some responsibility for, he stretched to accommodate justice. Serving one administration after another, Holbrooke accumulated friends and favors; he also made powerful enemies, and it was not always easy to tell one from the other. As a sometime outsider—he was descended from a Jewish immigrant named Golbraich—he desperately longed for power, wanting especially to rule over Foggy Bottom as Secretary of State. Alas, he did not achieve his aim, though Packer supposes he was worthy enough. Instead, he served other leaders, such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the latter of whom considered him disruptive. The author notes Holbrooke’s real accomplishments along the way, including founding an American cultural center in Germany and achieving delicate balancing acts in the intractable mess of Afghanistan. As Packer notes, he also had a “huge appetite for details [and] need to understand from the ground up," attributes that not every American diplomat shares. In the end, though egotistical and quick to be insulted, Holbrooke was also, by Packer’s absorbing account, highly capable.
Students of recent world history and of American power, hard and soft, will find this an endlessly fascinating study of character and events.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-307-95802-0
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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