Provocative and lucid: an owner’s manual for empire builders, complete with warnings of what can go wrong.
A curious empire, this: Unwilling though it may be, the U.S. is not just an imperial power but also the de facto government over much of the planet.
And it is unwilling, writes foreign-policy specialist Mandelbaum (American Foreign Policy/Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies), so much so that come the looming crisis of “unfunded mandates” and retiring baby boomers, which “will compel either a very steep rise in the taxes younger Americans pay or a sharp reduction in the benefits older Americans receive,” the nation’s first impulse may be toward isolationism. That would be a dangerous move, Mandelbaum argues; we provide governmental services (and a big army’s worth of protection) to the international system and concomitantly engage in unilateral politics “by default as well as by choice,” and in the vacuum that would follow our withdrawal, “the consequences of less governance are not likely to be pleasant.” Running the world without going broke—especially when we’re not seizing resources in the way of most previous empires—is a challenge, but one that we seem to be stuck with. Adds Mandelbaum, a more difficult challenge may be taking the leadership role in what he considers the 21st-century exigency supreme, namely the long-term transition from a global oil economy to something more sustainable—and, he argues, current patterns of U.S. oil consumption constitute a real threat to global security, odd behavior for the global policeman. The challenge becomes especially difficult because Americans dislike paying taxes—and the transition will certainly be costly—and because they “also bridle at accepting limits of almost any kind,” including, it seems, the idea that running the world may be overreaching a tad. Yet, thankfully, by Mandelbaum’s account we’re helped along by the “qualified global consensus” in favor of peace, democracy and free markets, the goods Goliath delivers to its friends.
Provocative and lucid: an owner’s manual for empire builders, complete with warnings of what can go wrong.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-58648-360-9
Page Count: 296
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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