Prepare, then, for failure—and for agonizing years of involvement in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia....
Is America ready to rule the world? Probably not. But, argues the author, it had better gear up to the task.
Prolific British historian Ferguson (History/New York Univ.), who has been building an empire of his own with books such as Empire (2003), The House of Rothschild (1999), and The Pity of War (1999), argues that the US is an empire in fact, with client states scattered around the world. Americans are reluctant to accept this fact for many reasons, although in the post–September 11 climate many more are warming up to the prospect; we’re made uncomfortable by being likened to Rome, Britain, and perhaps even the Soviet Union, by the thought that our financial, military, and cultural might casts a Green Giant–like shadow across the planet. Not that realpolitikers have been unprepared for the eventuality; Ferguson quotes a Bush administration State Department official who, before Dubya even took office, was urging Americans “to re-conceive their global role from one of traditional nation-state to an imperial power.” Well, there are empires and there are empires, and Ferguson suggests that the best of them is a liberal one, one dedicated to the free international exchange of capital, labor, and goods and to upholding the “conditions without which markets cannot function—peace and order, the rule of law, non-corrupt administration, stable fiscal and monetary policies.” Ideologically, at least, Americans should be well-equipped to administer such an empire, but we remain an empire in denial of the sort that “tends to make two mistakes when it chooses to intervene in the affairs of lesser states. The first may be to allocate insufficient resources to the non-military aspects of the project. The second, and the more serious, is to attempt economic and political transformation in an unrealistically short timeframe.”
Prepare, then, for failure—and for agonizing years of involvement in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia. Discomfiting, highly provocative reading, with ammunition for pro and con alike.Pub Date: April 24, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-013-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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
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
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