A valuable look at strategic thought and planning, one full of bad scenarios—and not much room for hope.
Though the White House may not believe that the climate is changing for the worse, the U.S. military does.
As Klare (Emeritus, Peace and World Security Studies/Hampshire Coll.; The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, 2012, etc.) writes, one of Donald Trump’s early acts in office was to countermand an executive order issued by Barack Obama instructing the military to identify threats to future operations and “enhance climate preparedness and resilience.” Given that so much of America’s arsenal is located and operates in climate-sensitive areas—along the coasts and in increasingly turbulent skies and seas—that order made good sense, but Trump gave pride of place to “the unbridled exploitation of America’s oil, coal, and natural gas reserves" instead. The military, writes the author, has been assessing climate change all the same, recognizing both that the U.S., like all nations, is susceptible to climate-related catastrophes such as hurricanes and drought and, moreover, that such disasters “will generate cascading effects within affected communities, triggering all sorts of disruptive and unpredictable outcomes.” Among the geopolitical hot spots that Klare identifies are an increasingly iceless Arctic Ocean, effectively a “whole new ocean” that the Navy must guard against Russian encroachment; and the nations of South Asia, where climate change is worsening already fraught relations between India and Pakistan. Senior officials in all branches of the service, “proceeding in their efforts to prepare for combat on a climate-altered planet,” have thus been examining future possibilities as well as observing the already evident effects of climate change, such as the flooding earlier this year that inundated a wing of the nuclear-capable Strategic Command and other military bases along the nation’s interior rivers. Klare closes by expressing hope that “under a new administration, these voices will be heard more widely, and we will all benefit from these officers’ valuable insights.”
A valuable look at strategic thought and planning, one full of bad scenarios—and not much room for hope.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62779-248-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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