Enough time has passed for some of Kaplan’s forecasts to develop cracks—e.g., China has not yet stumbled—but much rings...
The veteran political affairs journalist returns with a collection of essays that have been published in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the National Interest, and other venues.
Thoughtful, unsettling, but not apocalyptic analyses of world affairs flow steadily off the presses, and this is a superior example. Over the years, Kaplan (Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America's Role in the World, 2017), a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security, has written several. Except for a long, insightful first chapter, these essays appeared between one and 15 years ago, so they say nothing about the post-Trump world, but few have aged poorly. Marco Polo claimed to travel from Italy to China across central Asia, returning over the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. To Kaplan, this journey encompassed the great Eurasian land mass whose faded empires (Turkey, Iran), rising imperial powers (Russia, China), and failed states (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, etc.) have replaced Europe as the area most critical to American interests. Although aware, American leaders still continue to get it wrong. After apologizing for getting it wrong himself—he supported invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan—Kaplan devotes most essays to explaining the proper approach. A “realist” à la his hero, Henry Kissinger, Kaplan maintains that Americans must lead the world only because, if we don’t, another great power will step in. He emphasizes that today’s greatest international threat is not tyranny but anarchy. Nations need effective government more than free elections; in its absence, American efforts to promote democracy through military (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam) or quasi-military means (Libya, Syria) always fail.
Enough time has passed for some of Kaplan’s forecasts to develop cracks—e.g., China has not yet stumbled—but much rings true, and all are presented with enough verve and insight to tempt readers to set it aside to reread in a few years.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9679-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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