by Oona A. Hathaway & Scott J. Shapiro ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2017
Rich in implication, particularly in a bellicose time, and of much interest to students of modern history and international...
“If law shapes real power, and ideas shape the law, then we control our fate”—a searching analysis of contending views of state violence and warfare.
Signed into law in 1928 and ratified by the U.S. Senate with just one no vote, the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy effectively outlawed war. It remains in effect. Of course, the treaty, better known here as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, has not had much force. Yale Law School professors Hathaway and Shapiro (Legality, 2013, etc.) work their way through a vast body of data and centuries to examine how such an “internationalist” view of state relations came to be. They begin with the work of Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), a “corporate lawyer” in a time when the concept of the corporation was new, who had to tease out some thorny problems—e.g., is loot gotten in war justly gained? And what of piracy, especially when committed in the name of a corporation? (Grotius’ conclusion: an “employee of a trading company could wage war on his own authority.”) Against this “Old World Order” backdrop, Hathaway and Shapiro chart the development of an internationalist ethic embodied by the United Nations, whose constraints on war are less thoroughgoing than Kellogg-Briand strictly interpreted—for in the place of a no-war stance, a “just war” theory has evolved and is still evolving. Where war was once “the mechanism for solving disagreements between states,” as the authors write, it has been increasingly seen as the act of last resort. However, they add, given the new U.S. administration, that assumption may be outmoded: Donald Trump entered office on an “anti-internationalist platform that promised to restrict the movement of goods and people across borders,” a platform that risks the idea of peaceful cooperation in favor of “zero-sum military competition.”
Rich in implication, particularly in a bellicose time, and of much interest to students of modern history and international relations.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0986-7
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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