A persuasive argument and most timely case for coming up with another approach—now.
Forget clashes of civilizations and ideologies—the real war is about natural resources.
“In Angola and Sierra Leone,” national-security scholar Klare (Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, 1995) writes, “it was control of the diamond fields that sustained the bloodshed for so long; in the Congo, gold and copper; in Borneo and Cambodia, timber.” And now, in many parts of the world, the battle is over oil, a conflict that is reshaping American policy across the spectrum, such that “the U.S. military is being converted into a global oil-protection service” and much diplomatic effort is now invested in “securitizing” oil and wooing its producers into our camp. The outlines of that battle are only now taking shape; yet, Klare argues, what is certain is that the US is becoming ever more dependent on foreign sources of oil, “and thus increasingly vulnerable to the violence and disorder that accompanies oil production in politically unstable and often hostile producers.” Slightly more than half of the domestic oil demand in 2000, for instance, was met with foreign product; by 2025, that figure is expected to rise to 67.9 percent, or nearly 20 million barrels per day. Satisfying these needs will introduce conflict into regions whose rulers may tolerate us but whose people do not; this is true of the Persian Gulf, Klare notes, and may also be true of the so-called Alternative Eight, nations such as Mexico, Colombia, and Nigeria whose political futures are anything but certain, even if they “were to squeeze out such prodigious oil surpluses in the years ahead that they lived up to the sunny predictions of American policy makers.” More likely they will not, Klare suggests, which makes it ever more imperative that the US develop alternative sources of energy and “a comprehensive blueprint for the postpetroleum era” but quick. Instead we have Cheney and company’s “dangerous and deluded plan for more of the same”: more conflict, more dependency, more blood for oil.
A persuasive argument and most timely case for coming up with another approach—now.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-8050-7313-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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