A valiant attempt, with many fruitful insights, to help fashion citizens capable of sound independent judgments.
The president of the Council on Foreign Relations presents “the basics of what you need to know about the world, to make you more globally literate.”
In a follow-up to A World in Disarray (2017), Haass, a former diplomat and adviser for both George H.W. Bush and Colin Powell, examines “the ideas, issues, and institutions essential for a basic understanding of the world.” Though he focuses primarily on the era beginning with the Thirty Years’ War, the author references ancient history when it sheds light on contemporary circumstances. Haass takes a rather middle-of-the-road approach, trying to describe the mechanics of political science and global affairs in a way that provides context and perspective in writing that moves at a lively clip, both compact and inviting. Although he covers all the regions of the world, the lion’s share of the attention goes to, in descending order, Europe, North America, Asia, and everywhere else. The author explores the way things work, or don’t, in the political sphere: How do various state actors contend with terrorism? Did nuclear proliferation ever serve a positive role? Will cybercrime turn the internet on its head? Where are global health and trade headed? Will alliances and coalitions ever be enough to ensure global order? How do we best navigate the increasing effects of climate change? Throughout, Haass tries to track certain historical trajectories, with mixed success. During a discussion of the post–Cold War era, he writes, “no one would have the ability—and few would have the desire—to challenge the primacy of the United States given its tradition, with some exceptions, of not seeking to impose its will on others.” A strong case can be made for the primacy of “exceptions.” In covering so much territory in so little space, Haass can’t help but do a lot of skimming, though the lacunae are beguiling enough to make readers seek out deeper investigations into certain topics—and the author’s “Where To Go For More” section is a good start.
A valiant attempt, with many fruitful insights, to help fashion citizens capable of sound independent judgments.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-399-56239-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
At times slow-going, but the riveting period detail and dramatic flair eventually render this tale an animated history...
A murder that transfixed the world and the invention that made possible the chase for its perpetrator combine in this fitfully thrilling real-life mystery.
Using the same formula that propelled Devil in the White City (2003), Larson pairs the story of a groundbreaking advance with a pulpy murder drama to limn the sociological particulars of its pre-WWI setting. While White City featured the Chicago World’s Fair and America’s first serial killer, this combines the fascinating case of Dr. Hawley Crippen with the much less gripping tale of Guglielmo Marconi’s invention of radio. (Larson draws out the twin narratives for a long while before showing how they intersect.) Undeniably brilliant, Marconi came to fame at a young age, during a time when scientific discoveries held mass appeal and were demonstrated before awed crowds with circus-like theatricality. Marconi’s radio sets, with their accompanying explosions of light and noise, were tailor-made for such showcases. By the early-20th century, however, the Italian was fighting with rival wireless companies to maintain his competitive edge. The event that would bring his invention back into the limelight was the first great crime story of the century. A mild-mannered doctor from Michigan who had married a tempestuously demanding actress and moved to London, Crippen became the eye of a media storm in 1910 when, after his wife’s “disappearance” (he had buried her body in the basement), he set off with a younger woman on an ocean-liner bound for America. The ship’s captain, who soon discerned the couple’s identity, updated Scotland Yard (and the world) on the ship’s progress—by wireless. The chase that ends this story makes up for some tedious early stretches regarding Marconi’s business struggles.
At times slow-going, but the riveting period detail and dramatic flair eventually render this tale an animated history lesson.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-8066-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
As sharp and insightful as one would expect from this acclaimed author.
Essays focused on an overarching question: “What is race (other than genetic imagination), and why does it matter?”
Melding memoir, history, and trenchant literary analysis, Nobel Prize laureate Morrison (Emeritus, Humanities/Princeton Univ.; God Help the Child, 2015, etc.) offers perceptive reflections on the configuration of Otherness. Revised from her Norton Lectures at Harvard, the volume consists of six essays that consider how race is conceived, internalized, and culturally transmitted, drawing in part on writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Conrad, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the African writer Camara Laye, whose novel The Radiance of the King Morrison greatly admires. Laye told the story of a white man, stranded and destitute in Africa, struggling to maintain his assumptions of white privilege. For Morrison, the novel illuminates the pressures that “make us deny the foreigner in ourselves and make us resist to the death the commonness of humanity.” She also offers insightful glosses into her own aims as a novelist. “Narrative fiction,” she writes, “provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination.” In Beloved, for example, she reimagined the story of Margaret Garner, a slave who had killed her children rather than see them enslaved, as she had been. In A Mercy, she examined “the journey from sympathetic race relations to violent ones fostered by religion.” In Paradise, she delved into the issue of hierarchies of blackness by looking at “the contradictory results of devising a purely raced community”; she purposely did not identify her characters’ race in order to “simultaneously de-fang and theatricalize race, signaling, I hoped, how moveable and hopelessly meaningless the construct was.” In God Help the Child, Morrison considered “the triumphalism and deception that colorism fosters.” Her current novel in progress, she discloses, explores “the education of a racist—how does one move from a non-racial womb to the womb of racism”?
As sharp and insightful as one would expect from this acclaimed author.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-674-97645-0
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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