A well-written, thoughtful discussion of the broader issues raised by the introduction of futuristic technology to war.
Despite a title that sounds like science fiction, this is a down-to-earth look at the problems facing the American military, now and in years to come.
Latiff is a retired Air Force major general and is the director of Intelligence Community Programs at George Mason University. He spent much of his service time researching new weapons technology, and in the opening chapters, he features some of the recent creations and what they may be once they are ready for the battlefield. Readers will get a solid nontechnical overview of developments in such fields as robotics, drones, biotechnology, and genetics, with hints of their possible applications to battlefield situations. Among the things the future may hold: a pill that lets soldiers forget traumatic combat experiences and, as a result, avoid PTSD and a drone capable of deciding on its own, in milliseconds, whether a potential target is a threat that it should eliminate. But Latiff is interested in more than the tactical implications. He puts particular stress on the ethical dimensions they call up: whether deleting a memory is an intrusion on the soldier’s personal integrity and whether life-and-death decisions should be entrusted to machines without a human in the loop. Already, we are seeing how drone pilots, often far removed from the targets they strike, can be traumatized by the choices they face. The author contends that the general detachment of most Americans from military matters—with an all-volunteer Army, few families have any personal stake in whether the nation goes to war—enables politicians to promote military solutions to any foreign policy issue or to vote for bloated defense budgets to boost employment in their districts. Latiff also calls out senior officers who inhabit a bubble populated only by other military personnel. This cleareyed focus on the larger dimensions of the military enterprise raises the book above the narrowly technical discussion of new weapons and the tactics they require.
A well-written, thoughtful discussion of the broader issues raised by the introduction of futuristic technology to war.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-94760-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
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