Debatable, to be sure—but an urgent, interesting take on current geopolitics.
The folks who brought you the American hostage ordeal are now plotting worldwide jihad, as witness the recent Hamas uprising in Palestine. That’s reason enough, insists Ledeen (Tocqueville on American Character, 2000, etc.), to go toe-to-toe with Tehran.
The fundamentalist Iranian theocracy’s revolutionary vision “has not changed in the twenty-eight years since the overthrow of the shah,” writes Ledeen. That vision sees the West—and more particularly, the U.S. and Israel, its putative client state—as enemies that can only be pacified through annihilation. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may be a nutty Hitler worshiper, but, even though he’s a member of a sect that Khomeini once outlawed, he’s also sitting at the head of a government run by clerics who, it appears, are happy to precipitate a nuclear war in the interest of hastening Islam’s answer to Armageddon and the end of the world. By Ledeen’s account—and here rigorous documentation would have been welcome—the Iranian government is responsible for al-Qaeda, inasmuch as it trained al-Qaeda operatives, funded the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, sheltered terrorists after the invasion of Afghanistan and is now busily inserting al-Qaeda operatives into Iraq. What is more, he holds that Osama bin Laden died—yes, died—in Tehran, or else why would Ayman al-Zawahiri have been acting for the last year as if he were in charge? Zawahiri is, of course, in Iran, but al-Qaeda “no longer exists as a separate entity,” but is instead, like Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, a subsidiary of the Shi’ite mullahs. What is to be done? Thankfully, Ledeen holds that bombing the faithful may not have the desired effect; instead, he urges that the Iranian people be funded and supported in whatever way they wish toward the end of overthrowing the Islamic Republic, which has plenty of domestic opponents.
Debatable, to be sure—but an urgent, interesting take on current geopolitics.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-37655-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Truman Talley/St. Martin’s
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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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