“Ukraine deserves its place in the sun as a truly independent nation, but it must be realistic about the journey to that...
The Cold War gets hotter, thanks to Russian ambitions to rebuild the Soviet empire—but, veteran foreign correspondent Kalb (The Road to War: Presidential Commitments Honored and Betrayed, 2013, etc.) writes, thanks as well to Western ineptitude.
It all comes down to Ukraine, a country that is really two countries, one Western-facing, the other bound to Russia. It’s the eastern one that Russia has been gnawing into, claiming bits of territory here and there, most notably the Crimea after the last Winter Olympics. There has been much mishandling on all sides, not least when pro-Russian forces shot down a civilian airliner, killing hundreds of mostly Dutch travelers. However, argues the author, who was nearly finished with a doctorate in Russian before being whisked off into journalism by Edward R. Murrow, much that has occurred recently seems nearly inevitable. It will not please Moscow to read his criticisms of Putin, but neither will it please Kiev to learn that he considers much of its claim to autonomy from Russia to be misguided. Even though Russia has been the aggressor in the recent strife, he suggests that any accommodation will largely have to come from the Ukrainian side: “the first step out of the current crisis is an acceptable modus vivendi between Russia and Ukraine, an arrangement under which Russia, because it is by far the stronger of the two, gets the larger half of the loaf, Ukraine the smaller one.” Kalb also writes casually of inborn “Slavic indolence,” which is not likely to win him points on the eastern shore of the Danube and beyond. Finally, correct or not, the present administration is unlikely to warm to Kalb’s policy recommendations, since he paints President Barack Obama as someone alternately bewildered by and uninterested in Russian affairs, particularly the boss, Putin.
“Ukraine deserves its place in the sun as a truly independent nation, but it must be realistic about the journey to that goal.” Realism is a keyword in this think-tank treatise of much interest to policy wonks.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8157-2664-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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