An analysis for policy wonks to wrestle with, with one big unanswered question: Would Europe want the job?
The Middle East is a mess. And, Hadar argues, the U.S. ought to be in a hurry to get out of it.
Early on in this provocative essay, Hadar (Cato Institute) ventures that what is wanted in places like Palestine and Iraq is an “Ensemble of Great Powers” effectively led by Europe, which “should gradually take the place of the United States as the ‘balancer of last resort’ in the Middle East.” This realignment would serve American interests, he adds, by making possible a “constructive disengagement” from a region that yields mostly tears. But arrayed against what he holds to be an eminently sensible solution to our Middle East problems, if no one else’s, are the usual suspects on both left and right. Not least of the latter are the “inside-the-beltway crowd in Washington,” those who miss the Cold War and are afflicted by an “Enemy-Deprivation Syndrome” that causes them to seek foes to vanquish far from America’s shores. Hadar’s argument is somewhat more qualified than the usual isolationist tract, and it twits just about everyone in the current administration: Richard Perle’s argument that the U.S. has played a benign and enlightened role in the Middle East overlooks CIA high-jinks in Iran and Iraq and the State Department’s alliances with “the authoritarian and corrupt Arab regimes in the Persian Gulf and Egypt,” while neoconservative nation-building cheerleaders ignore the fact that “a democratic empire is unlikely to be sustained in the long run”; almost every civilian in the enterprise seems to ignore the fact that not everyone in the world thinks like an American. Hadar’s argument is sometimes counterintuitive and begs elaboration, as when he argues that the cost of maintaining a U.S. military presence in the Middle East is the real cause of rising oil prices. (Statistics, please.) Still, he scores points when he wonders how many soldiers will have to die in order to maintain the petroleum status quo.
An analysis for policy wonks to wrestle with, with one big unanswered question: Would Europe want the job?Pub Date: July 15, 2005
ISBN: 1-4039-6724-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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
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
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