A pragmatic and prescriptive critique that details what the US can do over the next dozen years to ensure peace, prosperity, and related blessings in the 21st century. Glasnost notwithstanding, former President Nixon (who misses few chances to remind readers of his wide acquaintanceship among world leaders past and present) harbors few illusions about the adversarial nature of relations between the US and the USSR. Within this persistently parlous context, he offers Washington a comprehensive, activist agenda for dealing—and competing with the Kremlin. Its cardinal points include: strengthening NATO; encouraging Japan to play a larger role on the global stage; fostering mainland China's economic development; and "showing the way" to so-called Third World countries. America, the author warns, call flinch from its mortal rivalry and yield to the lure of nco-isolationism only at the risk of making the world unsafe for flee nations. Nixon also counsels distinguishing vital national interests from peripheral concerns and defining foreign-policy objectives so that appropriately measured responses may be made to crises. Without shying from big-stick persuasion, he advises future Chief Executives to speak softly, tempering inflammatory Cold War rhetoric (which makes allies fear US recklessness rather than doubt Soviet intentions) and foregoing crowd-pleasing sentiments like "eliminating nuclear weapons from the face of the earth" that confuse public debate or raise unrealistic hopes. At the same time, Nixon points out that a reduction in tensions between the superpowers need not lessen vigilance; indeed, he asserts, dÉtente must be coupled with deterrence at the conventional-forces as well as nuclear level. On the political front, Nixon argues that genuinely creative initiatives must originate in the White House, because the bureaucracies—Defense, State, et al.—invariably rely on "standard school solution [s]." In like vein, he charges that diplomats "have a pervasive tendency to negotiate with themselves on behalf of the Soviets," i.e., by rejecting hard-line options as unacceptable to the Russians before talks begin. In the event, Nixon cautions, the goal of bargaining on any issue—arms control or otherwise—is security, not a treaty. A geopolitical briefing that's as worldly-wise as it is provocative and instructive.
Pub Date: April 29, 1988
ISBN: 0671678345
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1988
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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