Outstanding, only modestly alarmist geopolitics.
A combination of historical survey and contemporary analysis at the intersection of globalization and naval power.
Though writers regularly deplore globalization and few extol the massive American Navy, Easterbrook delivers an intensely researched, largely admiring account of both. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, write the author, agree that world trade often “hurts American workers,” but this is “flat-earth thinking.” However, “in the most recent century-length period, 1920 to 2020, global population trebled, while global GDP rose twentyfold.” World poverty plummeted, while trade’s share of the world economy jumped from 5% to 25%, and “95 percent of goods in commerce travel via water." Members of our so-called blue age, writes Easterbrook, “have lived better than any generation before, sacrificed less…been safer, and received better care than any other generation, in part because the seas are tranquil and affordable goods arrive on time.” Essential to trade are titanic container vessels that sail the world’s essentially ungoverned oceans, dominated for almost a century by the U.S. Navy. Shipping a container from Shanghai to Los Angeles today costs less than moving that same container across LA. Policing this is expensive; the 2020 “Navy budget worked out to $700 per American adult.” But recent presidents have largely ignored sea power, and Americans pay little attention except when denouncing globalization. Like many before him, Easterbrook warns that climate change could derail progress by roiling ocean conditions and disrupting food production. Most ominously, a resurgent China aims for “military parity” by 2049, and few doubt that this will happen. The author emphasizes that the blue age will continue only if the U.S. and China can get along. Easterbrook is fighting an uphill battle, but he makes a reasonable and convincing case that international trade under the benign aegis of the U.S. Navy plays an essential role that will not continue unless we adapt to a changing world.
Outstanding, only modestly alarmist geopolitics.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5417-4254-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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