Nixon calls the geopolitical policy he advocates in this brief book “hard-headed détente”: “a combination of détente with deterrence.” It entails basing the new medium-range missiles in Europe, of course, and building up conventional NATO forces (to what level, and with what degree of US participation, Nixon doesn’t say). It also entails a NATO response worldwide: “The Western alliance must realize the Soviet advances in the Third World threaten the lifeline of every Western industrial nation.” The Europeans shouldn’t think “that the US can do it all”; at Soviet/American summits, however, the US president “should carry with him the chits of the other major industrial powers.” To Nixon, “hard-nosed détente” worked for his administration – meaning him (Kissinger, interestingly, is unmentioned) – from 1969 through 1974, until Congress cut funds for Vietnam and cut off funds for Angola. Nixon still thinks we could have won in Vietnam. The lesson of Vietnam for the future – and immediately for El Salvador – is not to “provide just enough military aid…to keep them fighting, but not enough to win.” (The lesson of the Bay of Pigs is also insufficient force – but then Nixon thinks, too, that the Cubans would choose to return to Batista.) Intertwined with the central argument are strictures against peacenik and anti-nuke forces, Churchill, de Gaulle, Brezhnev, et al.). There are instances of great fatuousness. (Re his concern for Mexico: “I went to school with Mexican-Americans for 16 years. Mrs. Nixon and I spent two weeks in Mexico in 1940 on our wedding trip. Our daughters’ second language in college was Spanish.”) There is also evidence of the shrewd pragmatism – in, for instance, his comments on Kadar’s Hungary – that made Nixon not ineffectual in foreign affairs. And he has the Soviets retreating around the world – losing the battle for minds, losing economic ground – even as he has them advancing: the text is so simple (less prolix than the Nixon norm) that many readers will be able to see through it.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1983
ISBN: 0316611492
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1983
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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