HOW EVERYTHING BECAME WAR AND THE MILITARY BECAME EVERYTHING

Name: HOW EVERYTHING BECAME WAR AND THE MILITARY BECAME EVERYTHING
Author: Rosa Brooks
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7786-3

TALES FROM THE PENTAGON

by Rosa Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2016

Legal theorists and policymakers will approve the scholarship and close analysis; general readers will appreciate the...

bookshelf

A former senior Defense Department adviser explores the military’s expanded role in a time when the lines between war and peace are dangerously blurred.

When it comes to tennis, you can play by the rules, cheat, or remove the net and be playing a game that’s recognizably tennis. In a post–9/11 world of persistent warfare, attention to definitions and rules matters more than ever, Brooks (Law/Georgetown Univ.; Can Might Make Rights?: Building the Rule of Law after Military Interventions, 2006) insists, to avoid awakening to find “that war has swallowed us whole.” She expertly guides readers through this confusing new terrain, asking some basic questions. What constitutes an armed attack? What makes a soldier? What rules govern a drone strike or a special ops raid? What laws apply to National Security Agency wiretapping, indefinite lock-up, or to the violation of another nation’s sovereignty? Throughout her consistently engaging discussion, the author mixes history, politics, and law and draws on her wide-ranging personal experience, inside and outside government, to answer these queries and more. Increasingly, she notes, we call on our esteemed and well-funded military to navigate the eroding boundaries between war and peace, assigning our combat forces tasks—providing humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, medical and engineering support—that go well beyond their historic role. Now, because modern war is not easily contained, new models of law and of institutions will be required. Brooks offers a few suggested reforms, some more easily accomplished (recalibrating military recruitment) than others (universal service), but whether she’s invoking Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit image to illustrate the ambiguity of language and the importance of context, dissecting an excruciatingly difficult Hague Tribunal case assigning guilt to an obscure Croatian soldier, or drawing comparisons between a Putin-ordered assassination and an Obama-ordered drone strike, she never fails to stimulate and enlighten.

Legal theorists and policymakers will approve the scholarship and close analysis; general readers will appreciate the sensitive storytelling, the wit, and the uncommon good sense.

Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2016

ISBN: 978-1-4767-7786-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES

bookshelf

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

bookshelf

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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

bookshelf

INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

bookshelf

The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)