A convincing indictment of nation-states for crimes against the planet.
An academic assessment of the relationship between geography and the politics of nations.
Driven by an impetus to control and/or expand their territory and to influence what happens within and beyond their borders, “world powers use and abuse the earth,” writes geography professor Toal, author of Near Abroad: Putin, the West, and the Contest for Ukraine and the Caucasus. To protect and enhance their sovereignty and boost their economies, nation-states exploit the land, oceans, air, and now outer space, and they do so in competition with other nation-states. The author argues that this struggle for resources, trade, political status, and territorial dominance—anchored in the modernist “dream of endless growth”—has made, and continues to make, Earth less habitable. Toal’s title, however, is not quite accurate. The author emphasizes climate change, while discussions of geopolitics and the issue of declining empires are effectively absent. Toal devotes most of the book to the intellectual origins of—and counter-arguments to—a geopolitical point of view, and he does so insightfully and with authority. Major figures in the text include the 20th-century British geographer Halford Mackinder, the “Father of Geopolitics,” and the political theorist Carl Schmitt. Climate takes center stage only in the chapter on Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine; the author uses the invasion as an example of how war, a major form of international competition, devastates the environment. Central to Toal’s discussion is his assessment of NATO’s efforts to expand its territorial, political, and economic influence, an institutional project that may have triggered Putin’s attempt to remake Russia as a great power. In conclusion, the author reflects broadly on how current geopolitical factors might be changed to halt their destructive climate consequences. As an optimist, he suggests that “when conditions are right and leaders courageous, great powers can and do cooperate.”
A convincing indictment of nation-states for crimes against the planet.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780197693261
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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