An important cautionary tale—required reading for the next president.
A vivid insider’s account of the Clinton administration’s Middle East statecraft.
Where Patrick Tyler’s excellent A World of Trouble (2008) spreads over six decades, Indyk drills down, focusing on a single administration’s Middle East diplomacy. From his positions as National Security Council member and two-time ambassador to Israel, Indyk closely observed the personalities and myriad political considerations that drove Middle East policymaking from 1992 to 2000. His in-the-room recollections of major players like Syria’s Asad, Jordan’s King Hussein, Egypt’s Mubarak and PLO Chairman Arafat, as well as Israeli leaders Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon add color and dimension to his meticulous reconstruction of the intricacies of high-level diplomacy. Clinton set out to leave well enough alone in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to enforce a “dual containment” of Iraq and Iran and to broker an Arab-Israeli peace, first by achieving a breakthrough with Syria. Though he enjoyed some successes (an unexpected peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, for example) the strategy for the most part unraveled. Indyk hints at Clinton’s lack of unwavering principle and political discipline, but he attributes the diplomatic failure largely to the resistance of Arab leaders to change, Israeli political rivalries, Palestinian dysfunctionalism and periodic outbursts of violence and terror that sabotaged any chance for peace. Nevertheless, the author also squarely blames American ignorance, naiveté and idealism, examples of which abound here, all comically summarized by a botched instance of presidential gift-giving to Jordan’s king and queen. Sympathetic to the earnest efforts of his foreign-policy colleagues—Warren Christopher, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, Anthony Lake, Dennis Ross and Strobe Talbott—Indyk reserves his scorn for the succeeding Bush administration’s abandonment of the excruciatingly difficult peace process he so memorably describes.
An important cautionary tale—required reading for the next president.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9429-1
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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