GLOBAL POLITICAL LEADERSHIP AND THE PUBLIC

Khan, a research compliance officer at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center in Chicago, has ambitious aspirations for this text: to help “cultivate a global leadership mindset and skills to manage peace and make the world a better place for everyone.” His book, he says, draws on research, “his education, fifty-five-years of experience, and observation.” His experience includes time as an attending physician, pulmonologist, psychiatrist, college professor, chief of medicine, director of medical services, and hospital director. The author emphasizes the importance of good parenting, noting that his own parents were particularly encouraging; this allowed him to “unlock the abilities necessary to become a talented global leader,” which, he says, include insightfulness, self-confidence, open-mindedness, and courage, among other traits. A significant part of the book focuses on decision-making, with Khan providing more than a dozen examples of how he was able to quickly handle various medical cases. He also shares overviews of research related to brain development, focusing on the stages of childhood, genetics, and psychology. The book includes self-assessment and parent/caregiver-assessment tools, which aim to determine one’s base-line status when it comes to having or fostering leadership abilities. Over the course of this book, Khan presents readers with an earnest and appealing treatise on the nature of leadership that offers timely commentary (“Most of our current leaders are ‘illiterate,’ with no vision to make the right decision for the sake of people’s lives,” he asserts at one point) and proposes creating an “Independent Global Political Leadership” organization to assess world leaders. However, his medical case studies are the highlight of the book, providing an engaging and dramatic forum for showcasing his principles.