A timely, cogent work that should be required reading for policymakers.
A call for an Army-led volunteer corps to revitalize rural and small-town America.
Meyerson’s (Nature’s Army, 2001, etc.) persuasive narrative spans America’s founding to the present as he pitches a domestic nation-building program, modeled after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps. He revisits the little-known origin of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which was created by President Thomas Jefferson in 1802 to teach “useful skills” for developing the nation’s nascent infrastructure. He details the Army’s unheralded administration of the first national parks, nearly a century later, as well as its largely ignored role in operating Depression-era CCC camps. Since World War II, the Army’s nation-building focus has shifted abroad. The author makes the case that today’s hollowed-out heartland economy increases America’s vulnerability to terrorism and natural disasters, and he catalogs why the Army is uniquely qualified to lead a theoretical redevelopment and training program that he calls the American Resilience Corps. He brings together a few different trends, including the rise of the internet and digital manufacturing (specifically, 3-D printing), which he says make decentralization possible. He also highlights the Army’s embrace of “Net Zero” energy, water, and waste practices, driven by deployments at remote foreign locations; its strategies to preserve readiness by “islanding” domestic bases from the power grid and other terrorism targets, he says, put it at the vanguard of sustainable development. Meyerson, with his experience as a wartime journalist, congressional staffer, policy analyst, and independent scholar, blends smooth prose, detailed research, and a command of U.S. military history; he also shows a firm grasp of potential policymaking pitfalls. His supporting evidence is clear and compelling, and his proposal is a pleasure to read. The 2016 presidential campaign highlighted America’s urgent need to rebuild regions that have been left behind by the economy, but anger and blame have eclipsed concrete plans. This is a substantive program, however, that’s worthy of serious national debate.
A timely, cogent work that should be required reading for policymakers.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-79942-0
Page Count: 326
Publisher: John Marr Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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