A sturdy analysis of neoconservatism in American life.
An in-depth analytical history of neoconservatism and the men and women who created perhaps the most significant foreign-policy shift of the past 25 years.
How did the United States become embroiled in the current situation, mired in a seemingly endless war, with the rest of the world turned against us and with global threats apparently increasing by the day? Heilbrunn, a former editor at the New Republic, pegs this predicament on the backs of the neoconservatives, an obscure band of policy intellectuals who rose to prominence as cold warriors in the 1980s. He traces the group to their earliest forebearers in the 1930s, when a bunch of Jewish anti-communists formed in the heated intellectual environment of City College in New York. He then moves on to their later incarnations as anti-liberalists in the ’60s, their triumph as Cold War hawks in the ’80s and the culture wars of the ’90s, up through their final disgrace with the Iraq War. The author is a decent storyteller, and he brings a keen eye to the rivalries, debates and endless founding of new magazines of the group. He also offers welcome profiles of various academic mentors and intellectual protégés, many of them coming off as misunderstood artists trying to bore their way into an establishment that considers them too uncultured and too distrustful. Heilbrunn cleverly disguises his own sympathies, but readers may be left with the sense that he admires the neocon’s utopian sensibility and their ability to see through some of the contradictions of the Left. But he does fault them for their refusal to adjust their ideology to fit new facts and political and cultural scenarios. The book is nothing if not thorough, but may drift too far into the weeds for the average reader. Heilbrunn is also a bit too optimistic about how ideas affect elections, but there are worse faults in political historians.
A sturdy analysis of neoconservatism in American life.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-51181-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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