Think things are weird, dangerous and frightening now? Just wait, counsels Kissinger Associates managing director and former Time editor Ramo (No Visible Horizon: Surviving the World’s Most Dangerous Sport, 2003)—the mayhem is only beginning.
The world is more complex than we can imagine, Ramo notes, and in a revolutionary era, the only thing to do is “think and act like a revolutionary.” He adds that those who don’t “have a particular name: victims.” But what should be the focal point of our revolutionary thinking? Everything, says the author, starting with the fact that all that we know is wrong, such that our decisions seem to yield the wrong results. Given that, why listen to leaders, pundits and experts who get it wrong, and why follow the old course of making “minor adjustments to current policies, incremental change to institutions that are already collapsing, and an inevitable and frustrating expansion of failure”? After setting the tone, Ramo leaps into the shark-infested waters of geopolitics. He observes that we are incorrect to believe that the triumph of the West in the Cold War was inevitable—the Soviet Union fell to “the internal implosion of a society due to faults, twists, and kinks that even today we cannot map clearly”—and that we are misguided in our thinking that our current antiterrorism efforts are doing much more than producing more active terrorists. The old assumptions about the balance of power are off, since the old deterrents are gone; suicide bombers cannot be swayed in the same way cautious diplomats can. Ramo adds that focusing on “objects” such as Saddam Hussein at the expense of “the swirling, furious energy of the environment around those objects (clan rivalries, greed, corruption, a region aflame with fundamentalism),” you are bound to get mired down in places such as Iraq—a good reason, he remarks, to be smarter and less confrontational in dealing with other nations, particularly China.
A smart essay in geopolitics and realpolitik that does not foresee a rosy future for conformists.Pub Date: March 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-11808-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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BOOK REVIEW
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
15
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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