A cheerless prognostication of a future driven by energy-acquisition battles that will prove especially gloomy for those who think that the price of gas is already too high.
It has long been observed that the wars of the 21st century will be about such things as oil and water. The Nation defense analyst and national-security specialist Klare (Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Oil, 2004, etc.) is well positioned to write about such things. At the outset, he establishes a matter-of-fact tone that assumes the worst, at least if you’re a neocon: The United States was supposed to be the world’s one superpower after the Cold War ended, but at the moment Russia and China are rising rapidly, the former because of its vast energy holdings and potential, the latter because it has so much American money as a result of a staggering trade imbalance. The United States is thus not among the “nations that wield disproportionate power in the international system by virtue of their superior energy reserves,” even if the continued occupation of Iraq may one day give an advantage to U.S. energy companies. Energy is its own politics: For all the sword-waving and name-calling, the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez still supplies ten percent of America’s imported oil; the Darfur tragedy is ongoing precisely because Sudan has energy reserves and enjoys the diplomatic patronage of its chief customer for oil, China; the dictatorship of Kazakhstan is golden because it has so much oil, with Dick Cheney praising its government for “impressive political development” despite having rigged the last few elections and forbidden opposition. Klare urges several policy changes at the national and international level, including not just the expected call for increased efficiencies and the development of renewable energy, but also the formulation of new consortia: an alliance of Japan and China for the peaceful development of gas fields in the South China Sea.
A useful survey for students of energy, geopolitics and realpolitik.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8064-3
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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Not an easy read but an essential one.
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Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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