Hard on the heels of a widely publicized GAO report charging that the Pentagon oversold the high-tech weapons used during the 1991 Gulf War comes an informative, down-to-earth assessment of what arms the US military could and should bear in the years ahead. In providing a service-by-service rundown on the outlook for cyberwarriors, Dunnigan (coauthor of Victory at Sea, 1995, etc.) reviews the evolution of modern weaponry from the earliest missiles (rocks) and delivery systems (slings) through today's ICBMs and laser-guided ordnance. Along the way, he shows how development cycles have accelerated; where the widespread adoption of new arms (e.g., crossbows and muskets) once took centuries, radically different systems are now introduced every decade. The author also warns that the competence and training of troops remains a more decisive factor than their high-tech weapons (many of which are useless in venues like Somalia). In this monitory context, he argues that, despite the lack of a major conflict, another revolution in warfare is imminent, if not in progress. According to Dunnigan, its main elements could include: more effective communications that would allow front-line infantry to employ aircraft, armor, and artillery to better advantage; improved sensors able to make tactical missiles more lethal; thermal gunsights good enough to pierce the dark or smoke; computer- controlled robots; and so-called nonlethal weapons. In the meantime, the author notes, state-of-the-art technology not only permits substantive reductions in the crew requirements of naval vessels and aircraft but also threatens large nuclear-powered carriers. He goes on to conclude that funding is the sine qua non of advanced weaponry, cautioning that defense budgets historically have been a source of corruption and political infighting. An authoritative and enlightening survey of what the future might hold for those who engage in combat on America's behalf.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14588-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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