An authoritative, worrying analysis about the prospects for open conflict within the next few years.
A study of the growing urgency of the geopolitical competition between China and the U.S.
Many readers are aware of America’s ongoing competition with China, but Brands and Beckley, specialists in geopolitical history and strategy, express the full gravity of the situation. Their thesis is that China’s growth recently peaked and has begun to decline, but the ambition of its leaders to become the preeminent global power has not lessened. “The greatest geopolitical catastrophes occur at the intersection of ambition and desperation,” they write. “Xi Jinping’s China will soon be driven by plenty of both.” The internal difficulties of the country are escalating, with staggering demographic problems, a stagnating economy, and depletion of resources. By 2030, these issues will dramatically undermine China’s capacity to assert itself on the global stage. As such, write the authors, if China wants to make its big move, it will have to do so very soon. This was the case, they argue, with Germany in the period between the turn of the century and World War II as well as with Japan in the 1930s. In the current situation, the most obvious flashpoint is Taiwan, both to unify China (as Beijing sees it) and as a geopolitical statement of assertion. Therefore, the U.S. must actively manage the short-term crisis and emerge well placed for the long game. Such a strategy might include a treatylike agreement with Taiwan to station U.S. forces there while strengthening other partnerships, including with international organizations. China has a pattern of making threatening statements to anyone who disagrees with its plans, providing an opening for the U.S. to show what a China-dominated world would look like. Brands and Beckley are spot-on in the majority of their analysis, but one wonders if American leaders have the political will and diplomatic competence to implement their recommendations. Nevertheless, the authors have given us much to think about, and much of it is frightening.
An authoritative, worrying analysis about the prospects for open conflict within the next few years.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-02130-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
For fans only.
The hoodie-and-shorts-clad Pennsylvania senator blends the political and personal, and often not nicely.
Fetterman’s memoir addresses three major themes. The first—and the one he leads with—is depression and mental illness, which, combined with a stroke and heart trouble, brought him to a standstill and led him to contemplate suicide. The second is his rise to national-level politics from a Rust Belt town; as he writes, he’s carved a path as a contentious player with a populist streak and a dislike for elites. There are affecting moments in his personal reminiscences, especially when he writes of the lives of his working-class neighbors in impoverished southwestern Pennsylvania, its once-prosperous Monongahela River Valley “the most heartbreaking drive in the United States.” It’s the third element that’s problematic, and that’s his in-the-trenches account of daily politics. One frequent complaint is the media, as when he writes of one incident, “I am not the first public figure to get fucked by a reporter, and I won’t be the last. What was eye-opening was the window it gave into how people with disabilities navigate a world that doesn’t give a shit.” He reserves special disdain for his Senate race opponent Mehmet Oz, about whom he wonders, “If I had run against any other candidate…would I have lost? He got beaten by a guy recovering from a stroke.” Perhaps so, and Democratic stalwarts will likely be dismayed at his apparent warmish feelings for Donald Trump and dislike of his own party’s “performative protests.” If Fetterman’s book convinces a troubled soul to seek help, it will have done some good, but it’s hard to imagine that it will make much of an impression in the self-help literature. One wonders, meanwhile, at sentiments such as this: “If men are forced to choose between picking their party or keeping their balls, most men are going to choose their balls.”
For fans only.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780593799826
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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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