As his title implies, Sestanovich believes in “productive maximalism” that acknowledges America’s imperative to “call the...
An informed analysis of American foreign policy that reveals a cyclical pattern.
Sestanovich (International Diplomacy/Columbia Univ.) served in high posts under Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan and is currently a senior fellow for Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. In this overview of the last 12 presidential administrations, he identifies two contrasting stances: maximalism, characterized by aggressive, expensive responses to international challenges; and retrenchment, efforts “to unwind a disaster and to put American policy on a more sustainable foundation.” Truman, Kennedy, Reagan and George W. Bush were maximalists, the author writes. Eisenhower, Ford, Johnson, Nixon and Carter undertook retrenchment, providing “a corrective to the other’s mistakes.” Clinton and George H.W. Bush were hybrids. In each case, “when retrenchment fails to rebuild American power, meet new challenges, or compete effectively, the maximalist reappears, ready with ambitious formulas for doing so.” No matter who was president, Sestanovich found vehement discord among advisers, in Congress, and in public discourse, as maximalists vied with retrenchers or, midstream, changed their positions. In 1948, for example, Truman’s advisers Dean Acheson and George Kennan were at odds, with Kennan believing the Cold War was “a temporary spike of tension” that could be resolved through compromise, and Acheson refusing to yield to Soviet demands. The author analyzes Kennedy’s decision-making about Russia’s presence in Cuba and Johnson’s about Vietnam, which resulted in the administration’s conclusion “that the United States would succeed only if it could run the show.” The Obama administration began with retrenchment, Sestanovich writes, but while Obama favors “innovative, low-cost, and small-footprint approaches,” among those innovations are forceful measures such as drones, surveillance and Special Forces strikes.
As his title implies, Sestanovich believes in “productive maximalism” that acknowledges America’s imperative to “call the shots” to achieve “a satisfactory global order—secure, prosperous, and democratic.” This book gives ample evidence of the rocky road toward that goal.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-26817-4
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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