A provocative blueprint for increasing Pakistan’s international status and influence.
A wide-ranging strategy for Pakistan to improve its future as an economic and political power.
Niazi observes that while Pakistan possesses all the “essential ingredients” to become a great economic power—not just on the Indian subcontinent, but also globally—the country “has long suffered from a lack of vision, planning, strategy, and continuity.” To improve the nation’s fortunes, the author outlines a “comprehensive plan” designed to capitalize on Pakistan’s wealth of natural resources, geographical advantages, and infrastructure. At the heart of this strategy is the establishment of a Pakistan Economic Gateway that would connect the nation to the continents of Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia by overland and maritime corridors. This network of routes would not only capitalize on Pakistan’s “key geostrategic location” and enhance its commercial connectivity but also contribute to its food, energy, and climate security. The key here is to leverage Pakistan’s existing supply chain structure in addition to its considerable reserves of copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium. In this concise but analytically exacting study, Niazi constructs a panoramic recipe for Pakistan’s geopolitical ascendancy, one which includes a somewhat dubious “integrated Eurasian and Indian Ocean strategy” to secure its military and political significance. The brevity of the book is its chief challenge—so much ground is covered so quickly that it’s difficult for any of the positions staked out by the author to register as fully persuasive. It is one thing to observe that Pakistan “must build a credible deterrence against asymmetric and conventional threats,” and quite another to explain exactly how this is to be done, a task the author eschews. However, the notion that the proposed corridors could be the key to financing the nation’s infrastructural development is an enticing stimulus to further thought. At the very least, the reader is left wanting further elaborations upon Niazi’s thoughtful, well-informed proposals, and that makes his creative analysis well worth consideration.
A provocative blueprint for increasing Pakistan’s international status and influence.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9789699748271
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Markings Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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