In a well-articulated, arresting argument, Lebow (Political Science/Pittsburgh) and Stein (Political Science/Toronto) assert that the conventional wisdom that the West won the cold war is mistaken, and that military spending and geopolitical rivalry have exhausted the US and the countries of the former USSR, with implications that continue to haunt us today. Lebow and Stein make their case by examining two crises of the cold war: the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and 1973 the Arab-Israeli War. In both cases, the authors persuasively argue, the crisis was caused by politicians playing the game of ``deterrence.'' In Cuba, the American threat to use nuclear weapons was an escalation of the crisis; once the superpowers confronted each other, they needed to compromise in order to resolve the impasse (the problem was resolved when both governments agreed to remove missiles). In 1973, the US tried to prevent the Soviet Union from intervening in the Arab-Israeli War by alerting its strategic and conventional forces worldwide. Here, the crisis was resolved when the Soviet Union declined to respond to the alert. The authors argue, based on newly available evidence, that far from deterring the Soviet Union, the US worldwide alert actually might have escalated the crisis; the Soviet Union never had any intention of actually intervening, and a large group in the Kremlin argued that the it should respond by alerting its own forces. After examining how compromise and moderation resolved crises caused by deterrence theorists, Lebow and Stein contend that the nuclear arms race, far from preventing WW III, actually exacerbated superpower tensions and review evidence that Reagan's expansion of defense spending after 1981 delayed rather than accelerated the process of reform in the Soviet Union, which occurred for reasons largely unrelated to the superpower rivalry, and wasted resources urgently needed for domestic purposes. The authors conclude that deterrence prolonged rather than ended the cold war. An intelligent and provocative examination of the legacy of the cold war.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-691-03308-0
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlanticsenior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.
Remarkably comprehensive and coherent analysis of and prescriptions for America’s contemporary economic malaise by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Smith (Rethinking America, 1995, etc.).
“Over the past three decades,” writes the author, “we have become Two Americas.” We have arrived at a new Gilded Age, where “gross inequality of income and wealth” have become endemic. Such inequality is not simply the result of “impersonal and irresistible market forces,” but of quite deliberate corporate strategies and the public policies that enabled them. Smith sets out on a mission to trace the history of these strategies and policies, which transformed America from a roughly fair society to its current status as a plutocracy. He leaves few stones unturned. CEO culture has moved since the 1970s from a concern for the general well-being of society, including employees, to the single-minded pursuit of personal enrichment and short-term increases in stock prices. During much of the ’70s, CEO pay was roughly 40 times a worker’s pay; today that number is 367. Whether it be through outsourcing and factory closings, corporate reneging on once-promised contributions to employee health and retirement funds, the deregulation of Wall Street and the financial markets, a tax code which favors overwhelmingly the interests of corporate heads and the superrich—all of which Smith examines in fascinating detail—the American middle class has been left floundering. For its part, government has simply become an enabler and partner of the rich, as the rich have turned wealth into political influence and rigid conservative opposition has created the politics of gridlock. What, then, is to be done? Here, Smith’s brilliant analyses turn tepid, as he advocates for “a peaceful political revolution at the grassroots” to realign the priorities of government and the economy but offers only the vaguest of clues as to how this might occur.
Not flawless, but one of the best recent analyses of the contemporary woes of American economics and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6966-8
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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