A valuable primer on foreign-policy challenges that are sure to bedevil the United States for a long time to come.
Former Secretary of State Albright admonishes the current administration as she weighs in on al-Qaeda, the mistake of going to war in Iraq and the role of religion in foreign policy.
The author makes the not-exactly-controversial case that religious faith can move people and countries toward inspiring results (Pope John Paul II’s 1981 visit to then-communist Poland) or destruction (Osama bin Laden’s terrorism). She then suggests the diplomatic strategy the U.S. should take when dealing with conflicts involving religion, especially Islam. Negotiators, she writes, often prefer to steer away from thorny matters of belief. This is a mistake, as religion is inherent to many conflicts not only in the Middle East but around the world. Better to understand other faiths and try to find commonalities than to hope the differences go away, declares Albright (Madam Secretary, 2003). Unsurprisingly, she lauds former boss Bill Clinton for working to do this with the Palestinians and Israelis. She faults George Bush for projecting a sense of his own righteousness and launching the Iraq war, which she says may be one of America’s worst foreign-policy disasters ever. However, this is no polemic. Albright maintains a measured tone throughout, infusing her observations with personal anecdotes. She covers a lot of territory, with chapters on the teachings of Islam, faith and politics in the U.S., and the race between Christians and Muslims to convert Africans. To turn back radical Islam, she concludes, Americans need to develop nuanced understandings of individual Islamic countries, bolstering promising governments such as that of Turkey and treading carefully elsewhere to avoid igniting further passions. Rather than seeking to dominate through military force, Albright writes, America should work with its allies—and within international institutions and laws—to isolate violent religious extremists.
A valuable primer on foreign-policy challenges that are sure to bedevil the United States for a long time to come.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-089257-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
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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