A great resource for students of modern history and international law.
A sturdy account of the UN’s birth, starring the seven American politicians and civil servants who, “balancing peace with cold-eyed realism,” engineered the San Francisco conference that led to its creation.
The idea of an international body devoted to conflict resolution and cooperation was not new, writes World Policy Institute director Schlesinger, though previous efforts to forge one had had mixed success: the Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded the Napoleonic Wars, had ushered in more than half a century of peace and prosperity in Europe, but it came crashing down with the onset of WWI, and the League of Nations effectively died in childbirth. Still, that idea found adherents among both American conservatives (John Foster Dulles, Nelson Rockefeller) and liberals (Adlai Stevenson, Sumner Welles) in the late 1930s, and throughout WWII these influential men, working with behind-the-scenes players such as the Russian-born economist Leo Pasvolsky, worked to engineer consensus among their fellow decision-makers while balancing the sometimes conflicting visions of the postwar world that America’s allies harbored. Dealing with Stalin proved to be particularly vexing, Schlesinger shows, for by the time of Yalta the Soviets had developed a clear idea that they would be calling the shots in much of Europe. But, he adds, smaller countries had their worries, too. Many objected to the original UN charter, which vested veto power in only five major powers, causing a Turkish delegate to warn that “the small states are inevitably going to be reduced to the status of satellites of the great.” Yet, against formidable opposition, the seven US delegates succeeded in bringing their nation, and then governments worldwide, into agreement with the general aims of the charter, producing a body that, Schlesinger urges, has been largely successful in its mission ever since.
A great resource for students of modern history and international law.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8133-3324-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Asante is a talented writer, but his memoir is undernourished.
A young black man’s self-destructive arc, cut short by a passion for writing.
Asante’s (It’s Bigger than Hip-Hop, 2008, etc.) memoir, based on his teenage years in inner-city Philadelphia, undoubtedly reflects the experiences of many African-American youngsters today in such cities. By age 14, the author was an inquisitive, insecure teen facing the hazards that led his beleaguered mother, a teacher, to warn him, “[t]hey are out there looking for young black boys to put in the system.” This was first driven home to Asante when his brother received a long prison sentence for statutory rape; later, his father, a proud, unyielding scholar of Afrocentrism, abruptly left under financial strain, and his mother was hospitalized after increasing emotional instability. Despite their strong influences, Asante seemed headed for jail or death on the streets. This is not unexplored territory, but the book’s strength lies in Asante’s vibrant, specific observations and, at times, the percussive prose that captures them. The author’s fluid, filmic images of black urban life feel unique and disturbing: “Fiends, as thin as crack pipes, dance—the dancing dead….Everybody’s eyes curry yellow or smog gray, dead as sunken ships.” Unfortunately, this is balanced by a familiar stance of adolescent hip-hop braggadocio (with some of that genre’s misogyny) and by narrative melodrama of gangs and drug dealing that is neatly resolved in the final chapters, when an alternative school experience finally broke through Asante’s ennui and the murderous dealers to whom he owed thousands were conveniently arrested. The author constantly breaks up the storytelling with unnecessary spacing, lyrics from (mostly) 1990s rap, excerpts from his mother’s journal, letters from his imprisoned brother, and quotations from the scholars he encountered on his intellectual walkabout in his late adolescence. Still, young readers may benefit from Asante’s message: that an embrace of books and culture can help one slough off the genuinely dangerous pathologies of urban life.
Asante is a talented writer, but his memoir is undernourished.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9341-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
The collected "pieces" of the author of Go Tell It on the Mountain form a compelling unit as he applies the high drama of poetry and sociology to a penetrating analysis of the Negro experience on the American and European scene.
He bares the brutal boners of "everybody's protest novel" from Stowe to Wright; points out that black is "devil-color" according to Christian theology and to "make white" is thus to save; reveals the positive base of Carmen Jones, movie version, as Negroes are white, that is, moral. Beyond such artistic attitudinal displays lie experimental realities: the Harlem Ghetto with its Negro press, the positive element of which tries to emulate the white press and provides an incongruous mixture of slick style and stark subject; the Ghetto with its churches and its hatred of the American reality behind the Jewish face (from which, as sufferers, so much was expected). There is a trip to Atlanta for the Wallace campaign and indignities endured; there is a beautiful essay, from which the book takes its title- of father and son and the corroding power of hate as it could grow from injustice. In Europe, there is the encounter of African and American Negro; a sojourn in jail over a stolen sheet; and last, the poignant essay of the first Negro to come to a remote Swiss village, to be greeted as a living wonder. This is not true in America, where he has a place, though equivocal, in our united life.
The expression of so many insights enriches rather than clarifies, and behind every page stalks a man, an everyman, seeking his identity...and ours. Exceptional writing.
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 1955
ISBN: 0807064319
Page Count: -
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1955
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