A timely, reasoned treatise by a keen observer and historian.
A pertinent study of the relationship between the United States and China, in which “a rapidly ascending China [is] challeng[ing] America’s accustomed predominance.”
Using as point of departure the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’ explanation for the start of the Peloponnesian War (“It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable”), Allison (Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master's Insights on China, the United States, and the World, 2012, etc.), the director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, refers to the “natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power”—in this case, China versus the U.S. First, the author establishes what China and its ambitious president, Xi Jinping, are after—namely, using geoeconomic strength and manipulation to become the most powerful nation in the world. Indeed, Allison informs his surprised students, China has already surpassed the U.S. as the “manufacturing powerhouse of the world” and also in other areas such as infrastructure, military spending, and investments in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. China uses incrementally deployed instruments of “soft power” to establish mastery over its trading partners, employing nicely Sun Tzu’s dictum from The Art of War that “the highest victory is to defeat the enemy without ever fighting.” Relying on the work of the Thucydides Project Harvard, Allison draws on numerous examples over the last 500 years of the violent clashes between upstarts and established powers—e.g., the imperial ambitions of the U.S. under Theodore Roosevelt in challenging Spain at the turn of the 19th century and the world war sparked by competition between Germany and Britain in 1914. While the author offers numerous examples of how a fatal confrontation could erupt between the U.S. and China (e.g., the move for independence by Taiwan), he closes with a set of calming strategies to defuse tensions.
A timely, reasoned treatise by a keen observer and historian.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-93527-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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