A deeply insightful—and disturbing—analysis of both history and current affairs.
A magisterial history of international relations in American history.
“The foreign policy of the United States…has been unusually ideological, unusually economic, and unusually democratic,” writes Mandelbaum, professor emeritus at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with American leaders focused on ideals of liberty, human rights, and free elections. Comparatively weak for decades after the Revolution, America grew steadily, but it was the Civil War that caught the world’s attention. American money and production helped assure the Allied victory in World War I. Less “isolationist” between the wars than many popular histories claim, American foreign policy emphasized fiscal responsibility and disarmament until the Depression, when democratic powers turned inward and Germany and Japan sought to vastly expand their positions on the global stage. In his account of World War II, Mandelbaum emphasizes America’s own titanic expansion. By 1945, the U.S. manufactured 40% percent “of all the world’s armaments” and had built the world’s largest military. Then it was confronted by another superpower: the Soviet Union. Aided by conquests in Eastern Europe, a purported ally in Mao’s China, and the growing appeal of Marxism, the rise of the Soviets convinced Americans that they were under threat. This led to two large, disastrous wars in Korea and Vietnam, many smaller confrontations, a reconciliation with China, and, eventually, the unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s, America was the world’s unchallenged hyperpower, but the 21st century has been characterized by failure. The specter of terrorism, never a true military threat, obsessed American leaders, who plunged into expensive, fruitless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Mandelbaum painfully concludes that many so-called American ideals have lost their appeal. Across the globe, radical nationalism has surged, and autocrats, often freely elected, have assumed power in many nations. Jingoistic extremist movements are flourishing in Western Europe and the U.S., and China’s rapid rise seems to have demoted America to superpower status or perhaps introduced another hyperpower.
A deeply insightful—and disturbing—analysis of both history and current affairs.Pub Date: June 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-762179-0
Page Count: 600
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.
A deeply informed critique of the malicious initiatives currently using gender as a political tool to arouse fear and strengthen political and religious institutions.
In their latest book, following The Force of Nonviolence, Butler, the noted philosopher and gender studies scholar, documents and debunks the anti-gender ideology of the right, the core principle of which is that male and female are natural categories whose recognition is essential for the survival of the family, nations, and patriarchal order. Its proponents reject “sex” as a malleable category infused with prior political and cultural understandings. By turning gender into a “phantasmatic scene,” they enable those in positions of authority to deflect attention from such world-destroying forces as war, predatory capitalism, and climate change. Butler explores the ideology’s presence in the U.S., the U.K., Uganda, and Hungary, countries where legislation has limited the rights of trans and homosexual people and denied them their sexual identity. The author also delves into the ideology’s roots among Evangelicals and the Catholic Church and such political leaders as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Butler is particularly bothered by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), who treat trans women as “male predators in disguise.” For the author, “the gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never be fully closed.” They imagine “a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable” and calls for alliances across differences and “a radical democracy informed by socialist values.” Butler compensates for the thinness of some of their recommendations with an astute dissection of the ideology’s core ideas and impressive grasp of its intellectual pretensions. This is a wonderfully thoughtful and impassioned book on a critically important centerpiece of contemporary authoritarianism and patriarchy.
A master class in how gender has been weaponized in support of conservative values and authoritarian regimes.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780374608224
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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