A sympathetic, well-reported appreciation of the 42nd president’s exercise of America’s hard and soft power.
Middle East Times intelligence correspondent Sale (Traitors: The Worst Acts of Treason in American History from Benedict Arnold to Robert Hanssen, 2003, etc.) urges a much higher ranking for President Clinton as a commander in chief.
Notwithstanding the president’s lack of foreign-policy experience and famously awkward relations with the military, Sale contends that by his departure from office the president’s diplomacy and carefully calibrated use of force place him among the more influential commanders in chief of the 20th century. It’s a somewhat surprising verdict given the evidence amassed here about Clinton’s deficiencies, about a lackluster first term and about a broadly defined foreign-policy team so lame the president once declared there “wasn’t a winner among them.” A wide cast of characters take a beating in the narrative: Anthony Lake, Les Aspin, Warren Christopher, William Cohen, Louis Freeh, Hugh Shelton, Colin Powell, James Woolsey, John Deutch, Sandy Berger and Madeline Albright, to a degree, all come in for a hammering. Only Al Gore, Leon Fuerth, Richard Clarke, William Perry, Richard Holbrooke, Peter Galbraith and Wesley Clark survive undiminished, as Sale details the rivalries among Clinton’s advisors and recounts the administration’s response to crises in Haiti, Somalia and especially the Balkans and the Middle East where, the author argues, Clinton’s covert operations made a crucial difference. The book’s most interesting and meticulously reported passages deal with Clinton’s behind-the-scenes maneuvering to topple Saddam Hussein, to kill bin Laden, to cajole NATO allies and to arm Croat ground forces against the Bosnian Serbs. Sale convincingly likens Clinton’s force of personality, love of subterfuge and shrewd understanding of public opinion to FDR, and he makes the case that the first truly post–Cold War administration confronted unique foreign-policy challenges. By the time of the war in Kosovo, which brought the loathsome Milosevic to heel, Sale depicts the president as surely more accustomed to wielding power on the world stage, but he fails to wholly persuade us that the war’s favorable outcome was attributable to a newly tough and purposeful Clinton.
A sympathetic, well-reported appreciation of the 42nd president’s exercise of America’s hard and soft power.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-37366-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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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