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
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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