A fine handbook for anyone interested in the workings of international policy.
The veteran journalist and diplomat recounts lessons learned over a distinguished career.
When she was a young staffer at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Power (Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight To Save the World, 2008, etc.), an Irish immigrant who grew up in Atlanta, snuck into the office of a Foreign Policy editor, made off with some letterhead, and typed up a recommendation as “Balkan Correspondent” for the journal. “I had a guilty conscience,” she writes, “but I also had what I needed to obtain my press pass.” That’s about the lightest moment of this candid and instructive book. The author made her way to Yugoslavia in time to witness the soft power of American diplomacy: The war in Bosnia ended not by military means on the part of the U.S. and NATO, but instead “by exerting unrelenting diplomatic pressure on both sides.” The education proved useful when Power served as a policy adviser in the Obama administration, where she witnessed a president at work who held strongly that “peace requires responsibility" and wasn’t shy about using the military as part of an articulated strategy that relied more on diplomacy. The author, who was later appointed the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, clearly admires her former boss, though not uncritically; on matters such as the handling of Libya in the last days of the Qaddafi regime, she finds lack of coherence. Still, she clearly understands the use of soft power, noting, for instance, the long-standing understanding of U.N. officials that conflict often has an economic basis that can be averted by delivering aid judiciously. She is not uncritical of that organization, either, pointing to procedural quirks that enabled Vladimir Putin to exercise outsized influence on events. On that note, she has no use for Obama’s successor, writing, “while I once viewed the conflict in Bosnia as a last gasp of ethnic chauvinism and demagoguery from a bygone era, it now seems a harbinger of the way today’s autocrats and opportunists exploit grievances.”
A fine handbook for anyone interested in the workings of international policy.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-282069-3
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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