Although academic and largely unspecific, the book offers much fodder for the running debate about America’s role in the...
Understanding the naïve, distorted prism through which the United States views the rest of the world.
In this scholarly book, Pillar (Center for Security Studies, Georgetown Univ.; Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform, 2011, etc.) examines some of the national characteristics and proclivities that encourage Americans to see the world in overly optimistic, Manichaean terms and the dangerous impact thereof on foreign policy. With the “moat” of two vast oceans separating the American continent from the troubled, crowded European theater—and while enjoying the bounty of massive natural resources without enemies in proximity—Americans tend to project a benevolent view of the world and expect the rest of the world to comply. America’s “exceptionalism”—an ingrained sense that the nation is unlike any other, founded on enlightened principles, free of nasty imperial history, and therefore superior—sets it on a collision course with the rest of the world, which does not share its sense of entitlement. Part of what Pillar sees as America’s “uncorrected ignorance” was generated early on, before America became a global power, without the “close and continuous interaction or competition with other countries that would have challenged American ideology and American conventional wisdom.” The country’s long period of invulnerability from foreign threats impedes it from sharing in other countries’ real security fears, engendering insensitivity and bewilderment, while the sharp distinctions between good and bad—e.g., presidents calling the enemy the “evil empire” and “axis of evil”—harken back to a period of heightened religiosity. Pillar argues that this profound lack of self-awareness has had a detrimental effect on American foreign policy by working from the demonizing presumption that “the adversary is always up to no good” (e.g., Iran), exacerbating common perceptions about “foreigners.” Furthermore, partisan competition often compounds avoidable misunderstandings.
Although academic and largely unspecific, the book offers much fodder for the running debate about America’s role in the world.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-16590-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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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