A hawkish book that will likely please “America Firsters” and xenophobes but might seem unbalanced to those who decry...
The chief national security correspondent for CNN, journalist Sciutto explores a variety of dangers to the standing of the United States in the world order, with an emphasis on the dastardly plans of Russia and China.
Sciutto (Against Us: The New Face of America's Enemies in the Muslim World, 2008) focuses on threats to the U.S. military on the ground, in the air, and on the sea, and he also devotes chapters to cyberattacks and industrial espionage targeting American corporations. “This is a book about what happens when the enemies of the West realize that while they are unlikely to win a shooting war, they have another path to victory,” he writes. Throughout, the author’s tone is largely alarmist in nature, as he explains why he believes naïve and/or incompetent U.S. policymakers are ceding influence to the increasingly aggressive Chinese and Russians. Sciutto views the nationalism around the globe as a deadly game of winners and losers, with few shades of grey. He rarely portrays the U.S. government and military as the perpetrators of unwelcome aggressions across national borders. Rather, he suggests the U.S. is almost always the victim of an increasingly desperate Russia and a surging China. Sciutto portrays each non-American nation as a monolith lacking a substantial minority of dissenters. Some of the scenarios he examines will not be familiar to a broad swath of Americans—e.g., Russian cyberwarfare against its former state of Estonia. Many readers will be interested in Sciutto’s account of Russian hacking during the 2016 presidential election. However, while his review is useful, it contains no stunning revelations and is certain to be out of date by the time the book publishes.
A hawkish book that will likely please “America Firsters” and xenophobes but might seem unbalanced to those who decry several centuries of U.S. aggression around the globe.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-285364-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2019
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.
A firsthand account of how the Navajo language was used to help defeat the Japanese in World War II.
At the age of 17, Nez (an English name assigned to him in kindergarten) volunteered for the Marines just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Growing up in a traditional Navajo community, he became fluent in English, his second language, in government-run boarding schools. The author writes that he wanted to serve his country and explore “the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world.” Because he was bilingual, he was one of the original 29 “code talkers” selected to develop a secret, unbreakable code based on the Navajo language, which was to be used for battlefield military communications on the Pacific front. Because the Navajo language is tonal and unwritten, it is extremely difficult for a non-native speaker to learn. The code created an alphabet based on English words such as ant for “A,” which were then translated into its Navajo equivalent. On the battlefield, Navajo code talkers would use voice transmissions over the radio, spoken in Navajo to convey secret information. Nez writes movingly about the hard-fought battles waged by the Marines to recapture Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and others, in which he and his fellow code talkers played a crucial role. He situates his wartime experiences in the context of his life before the war, growing up on a sheep farm, and after when he worked for the VA and raised a family in New Mexico. Although he had hoped to make his family proud of his wartime role, until 1968 the code was classified and he was sworn to silence. He sums up his life “as better than he could ever have expected,” and looks back with pride on the part he played in “a new, triumphant oral and written [Navajo] tradition,” his culture's contribution to victory.
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-24423-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and...
An enchanting plea by the award-winning Nigerian novelist to channel anger about gender inequality into positive change.
Employing personal experience in her examination of “the specific and particular problem of gender,” National Book Critics Circle winner Adichie (Americanah, 2013, etc.) gently and effectively brings the argument about whether feminism is still relevant to an accessible level for all readers. An edited version of a 2012 TEDxEuston talk she delivered, this brief essay moves from the personal to the general. The author discusses how she was treated as a second-class citizen back home in Nigeria (walking into a hotel and being taken for a sex worker; shut out of even family meetings, in which only the male members participate) and suggests new ways of socialization for both girls and boys (e.g., teaching both to cook). Adichie assumes most of her readers are like her “brilliant, progressive” friend Louis, who insists that women were discriminated against in the past but that “[e]verything is fine now for women.” Yet when actively confronted by an instance of gender bias—the parking attendant thanked Louis for the tip, although Adichie had been the one to give it—Louis had to recognize that men still don’t recognize a woman’s full equality in society. The example from her childhood at school in Nigeria is perhaps the most poignant, demonstrating how insidious and entrenched gender bias is and how damaging it is to the tender psyches of young people: The primary teacher enforced an arbitrary rule (“she assumed it was obvious”) that the class monitor had to be a boy, even though the then-9-year-old author had earned the privilege by winning the highest grade in the class. Adichie makes her arguments quietly but skillfully.
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and awareness.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-91176-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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