A challenge for the general reader but a feast for students of law, foreign policy and international relations.
A distinguished scholar proposes an entirely new way of understanding and combating modern terrorism.
With the startling statement that “almost every widely held idea we currently entertain about twenty-first century terrorism and its relationship to the Wars against Terror is wrong and must be thoroughly rethought,” Bobbitt (Law/Columbia Univ.; The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, 2002, etc.) reframes the discussion, placing terrorism in a historical, strategic and legal context. Building on the premises of his previous work and drawing on a staggeringly wide array of authorities, he argues that with the emergence of the globalized market state, we can expect terror groups to become every bit as worldwide, networked and decentralized as the states themselves. In this sense, the market states have “caused” terrorism or, at least, forced it to assume its modern face. With access to lethal weapons and state-of-the-art communications, future terrorists will make al-Qaeda memorable only as a crude pioneer. To meet this security threat, writes the author, states that depend on the consent of the governed must radically recalibrate their strategies and laws. Bobbitt’s prescriptions for preventing terrorism and the proliferation of WMDs, for intervening to prevent genocide or ethnic cleansing, and for mitigating the human-rights consequences of natural catastrophes will likely prove controversial. There are many who will disagree with his arguments, including those unconverted to his belief in the waning of the nation-state, those who insist that the target is confined to radical Islam, and those who resist the idea that we are in a proper war and recoil at the prospect of any diminution of our civil rights to fight it. But this is a serious book, and, notwithstanding his impressive theoretical reach and philosophical scope, Bobbitt keeps his feet on the ground, boldly offering detailed real-world proposals to combat the problems he outlines. To learn, for example, that our safety may require the repeal of statutes passed in the wake of the Civil War—specifically, the Posse Comitatus Act—is to glimpse the shaky state of our preparedness for this new conflict.
A challenge for the general reader but a feast for students of law, foreign policy and international relations.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4243-2
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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