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THE VIOLENCE OF PEACE

AMERICA'S WARS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA

Smart, nuanced and worrying, given a nation mired in two wars—and with more, perhaps, on the horizon.

Barack Obama, Bushian warmonger.

That’s an oversimplification of the author’s argument, but the point remains: As noted legal scholar and novelist Carter (Law/Yale Univ.; Jericho’s Fall, 2009, etc.) examines the morality of war, and in particular President Obama’s theory of just war, he concludes that the continuum from Bush to current times is more continuous than disrupted. President Obama, writes the author, has failed to discontinue many of his predecessor’s practices, even ones against which he campaigned. For one thing, though at least in theory America does not torture its captives, there is no evidence to suggest that “rendition” to countries less scrupulous about waterboarding and fingernail-pulling has diminished since 2008. The Obama administration seems to have accepted without much qualification the theory, thoroughly applied during the Bush years but antedating them, that American citizens who aid the enemy are candidates not for trial but for assassination. Obama may even go a step further than Bush, Carter writes, should he become actively committed to the principle that citizens oppressed by their governments are candidates for deliverance by American warriors. The author provides lucid commentary on the complexities of jus in bello theories, and he seems to be a realist: America has real enemies in the world, against whom real opposition is wanted. The so-called War on Terror has as its goal not victory but prevention, and, given that “you cannot keep your enemy from striking unless you know his plans,” the ability to acquire that knowledge in a timely way becomes paramount—though whether the means justify the ends remains a matter for argument.

Smart, nuanced and worrying, given a nation mired in two wars—and with more, perhaps, on the horizon.

Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-9842951-7-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Beast Books

Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969

ISBN: 0375507892

Page Count: 235

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969

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