An important contribution to the study of both war and peace.
A sweeping history of war and peace—and an impassioned call to choose the latter over the former.
Author Vivo (Short History of World Religions, 2012) forwards a provocative argument that the world can be purged of war: “It is not a futile enterprise to propose a world without war, nor does this form part of utopian thought.” First, Vivo lays out the evidence for considering empathy, rather than violence, as the defining feature of human nature. Along these lines, the book provides as comprehensive a tour of peace, harmonious existence, and tranquility as it does of war, demonstrating the precedent for diplomatically brokered compromise winning out over conflict. Vivo contends that a variety of peculiarly modern conditions—like the development of weapons of mass destruction—makes war indefensible because it necessarily involves the murders of innocent civilians, often banally referred to as “collateral damage.” The end of war can be accomplished through its criminalization, says Vivo, which requires a strengthening of international law and, by extension, the improvement and expansion of those supranational institutions tasked with world governance. For those who would consider the end of war a quixotic charge, the author points to slavery, torture, and racism as examples of human darkness once ubiquitous but now nearly universally derided as morally repugnant. This is an ambitious book, one that treats the reader to a panoramic survey of Western intellectual history, discussing John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Aristotle, and a huge cast of philosophical characters. The work is impressively rigorous, although some might find the author’s faith in the future of international peacekeeping institutions too sanguine. However, this book remains a fascinating combination of erudition and humane activism, and in this regard, it ably reflects the thinking of the Enlightenment, from which it so often draws inspiration.
An important contribution to the study of both war and peace.Pub Date: April 25, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 281
Publisher: Hojas del Sur
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
