A scholarly education in the elements of effective government, although readers may conclude that no amount of insight can...
Innumerable authors describe why American efforts to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq failed disastrously; fewer explain how we could have done it right. That’s the purpose of this closely reasoned political science lesson.
In her latest book, Gregg (Defense Analysis/Naval Postgraduate School; The Path to Salvation: Religious Violence from the Crusades to Jihad, 2014, etc.) argues that U.S. leaders focused on the “state” at the expense of the “nation,” and their first mistake was to conflate the two. A “state” is a legally recognized territory that provides services for its population in exchange for its loyalty. A “nation” is a group that shares a common past and traditions and perhaps a language. In its obsession with state-building, the U.S. spent perhaps as much as $1 trillion to provide an army, police, public utilities, courts, education, health care, and (an obsession) elections. American officials failed to understand that people “need to identify with their country on a personal level, share its norms, and believe in their common destiny.” Gregg’s advice will remind readers of the “winning hearts and minds” campaign from the Vietnam War. In fact, winning hearts and minds worked whenever America tried it in Vietnam as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. The disadvantage is that it’s expensive and takes a long time, so leaders soon discard it in favor of tactics that seem cheaper and quicker: currently, drones and Special Forces. The author admits that nation-building is not a program that can be completed “in five, ten, or fifty years. Rather, building the state and nation is an ever-continuing process that requires constant adjustments to meet the demands of the people, their sense of national unity, and the role of the state.”
A scholarly education in the elements of effective government, although readers may conclude that no amount of insight can provide a happy outcome to wars that should not have been fought in the first place.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64012-087-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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