Of considerable interest to students of geopolitics, realpolitik, and the state of the world today.
An exhaustive study of Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy” efforts to bring about peace—or, better, stability—in the world’s most reliable tinderbox.
“If diplomacy is the art of moving political leaders to places they are reluctant to go, then Kissinger was a master of the game,” writes Indyk, a former Clinton administration National Security Council adviser and, later, two-time ambassador to Israel. The author casts an appreciative but not uncritical eye on Kissinger and his “Machiavellian ability to deploy the levers of influence bestowed upon him by immense American power.” That power allowed him to maneuver Israel and its Middle Eastern antagonists into concessions that stepped outside the usual give-and-get mindset and instead focused on establishing a balance of powers, more or less. Indyk argues that Kissinger’s fundamental aim wasn’t peace per se, but order—order in the sense of the absence of chaos that war and enmity can bring about. Indeed, “he did not believe in peace as an achievable or even desirable objective.” Kissinger’s model, pressed not just by him, but also by many successors up until the utter failure of the Trump administration, saw some unusual advances: For one thing, Egypt no longer goes to war with Israel every few years. That model was time-bound to some degree, for it was also calculated to outmaneuver the Soviet Union while at the same time allowing it a role in that order. We should remember, Indyk observes, that Kissinger was able to persuade Israel to pull back settlements in occupied territories, something unimaginable today, and defanged an intransigent Syria. Yet, writes the author, Kissinger’s approach was not wholly successful: He failed to engage Jordan in the process, because, in the matter of its ruler, “he liked the king but he didn’t value him.” Flaws or not, Kissinger’s work, incomplete as it remains, was more effective than anything done in recent years and a project worthy of Indyk’s painstaking, always lucid analysis.
Of considerable interest to students of geopolitics, realpolitik, and the state of the world today.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-101-94754-8
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
