An exhaustive study that leaves open the question of whether the Biden administration can maintain a steadier hand.
Breaking down the messy nature of Donald Trump’s hard-line China policy and how China took advantage of the relationship.
The last four years of the American government’s stance regarding China was largely guided by the realization that the prior 40-year experiment of engagement and accommodation was not working. China simply did not want political liberalization, and growing evidence revealed that the Chinese Communist Party was infiltrating many facets of American society, from universities to Silicon Valley to Wall Street. As Washington Post foreign policy columnist Rogin shows in meticulous, depressing detail, even though candidate Trump’s aggressive approach effectively called out the authoritarian regime, the administration’s “dysfunction and the president’s behavior” led to erratic results. From the beginning, Trump loyalists like Jared Kushner—guided by Steve Mnuchin and other “pro-business players”—and Steve Bannon fashioned themselves as China experts. Regarding Bannon, the author writes, “it takes real nerve to lead a populist, anti-China movement when you started as a Goldman Sachs executive—and when you have already made your money in China before turning against the system that made that possible. After he left Goldman, Bannon worked for…a Hong Kong startup…[that] used cheap labor in China to mine virtual goods inside computer games to sell for real-world money.” On the other hand, Matthew Pottinger, National Security Council senior director for Asia, managed to craft an intelligible policy and was one of the few who stuck it out for all four years of Trump’s presidency. Rogin delineates how, by 2018, hawks like Mike Pompeo and Mike Pence overruled the pro-business faction, leading to the implementation of tariffs and an all-out trade war. The spread of Covid-19, which Trump repeatedly dubbed the “China virus,” as well as the violent suppression in Hong Kong ensured that U.S.–China relations reached a low point by the 2020 election. It doesn’t make for heartening reading, but Rogin covers it comprehensively.
An exhaustive study that leaves open the question of whether the Biden administration can maintain a steadier hand.Pub Date: March 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-39324-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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