We can stop the nuclear threat cold, Allison argues—but only by taking it seriously. His criticisms seem eminently well...
Al Qaeda promises that four million Americans are slated to die in its jihad. Such numbers mean dirty bombs and worse—and, we’re warned here, the government is doing too little to deal with the threat.
“If the United States and other governments keep doing what they are doing today,” writes former assistant secretary of defense Allison (Government/Harvard Univ.), “a nuclear terrorist attack on America is more likely than not in the decade ahead.” Never mind those other governments; what is ours doing? Many things, and badly, according to Allison. One is failing to assess the whereabouts and to control the flow of extant stores of nuclear materials; at least 84 suitcase-sized bombs once kept by the KGB, for instance, have gone missing since the fall of the Soviet Union, and American intelligence agencies seem to have no idea where they are, to say nothing of homegrown supplies of uranium and plutonium that seem to have fallen off the truck. This failure is perhaps understandable, Allison acknowledges, but it speaks to systemic weaknesses; after all, Western intelligence as a whole failed as well to put Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult on its radar, and the group “spent half a decade building weapons of mass destruction without arousing concern.” Another failure is that of squashing Third World powers that have acquired the bomb; Allison proposes a “Three No’s” program that begins “with an unambiguous bright line: no nuclear North Korea,” even if North Korea may now have more than half-a-dozen tactical nuclear weapons in its arsenal. Still another failure is the war on Iraq, which has diverted attention from North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan—and, of course, from al Qaeda and all its terrible ambitions, which “can make 9/11 a footnote.” And so forth, in a somber but unfailingly attention-getting litany.
We can stop the nuclear threat cold, Allison argues—but only by taking it seriously. His criticisms seem eminently well founded and deserving of discussion and debate.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7651-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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