A well-argued white paper for the internationalist set—and sure to be dismissed as wooly liberalism by readers on the right.
A pointed examination, both timely and lively, of the risks and responsibilities attendant in being the world’s sole superpower.
Since the day of Woodrow Wilson, when America’s global power first became apparent, politicians have expressed discomfort at the notion that the US is anything other than a world apart. Yet, as Newsweek writer Hirsh persuasively argues, this kind of isolationist thinking is both deluded and dangerous, for “today we simply cannot live in the world safely without setting it in order”—without, that is, removing tyrants and terrorists from the scene, but also, and more vexing, improving the lot of the rest of the planet’s inhabitants. The present administration, Hirsh writes, is sharply divided on whether we have any such responsibilities at all, or whether we have much business acting as the globe’s lone sheriff; witness, he remarks, the ongoing clash between the wings of the Cabinet represented by Donald Rumsfeld on one hand and Colin Powell on the other, the first concerned with visiting vengeance on wrongdoers, the second with nation- and coalition-building. Owing to the ascendance of the former, Hirsh argues, the president has steadily been “frittering away much of the goodwill he had started out with after September 11,” while the so-called Bush Doctrine has effectively been serving as an instrument of isolation all its own, alienating allies all around. If the world is indeed to be made safe from terrorists and rogue states, Hirsh maintains, the US will have to take the lead. But it will do so most effectively by turning to the international organizations it has helped bring into being, especially the United Nations: “Washington must get past its now-settled bias that the UN and its sister agencies are hopeless, effete institutions,” he writes, “recognize where they have value, focus on improving their performance in those areas, and fund them accordingly.”
A well-argued white paper for the internationalist set—and sure to be dismissed as wooly liberalism by readers on the right.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-19-515269-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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