For policy wonks, but with scenarios that ought to frighten just about everyone.
On high-tech battlefields and the race to dominate them.
The year 2024 marked the highest number of international conflicts since 1946, and, with them, “the world appears headed toward greater fragmentation and a wider dispersion of power.” So writes Feldstein, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace whose subject is war and the technology of war. American power, he observes, has declined in recent years, partly by isolationist design, partly because nations, such as China, are asserting themselves more forcefully on the international stage. This doesn’t necessarily mean, he adds, that China will overtake the United States as a global power. It does mean that the idea of America as the world’s sole superpower has to be revised to take into account regional powers, such as Brazil and South Africa, as well as larger players, like Russia. A notable rising example is Turkey, which has been increasingly influential in the Middle East (and has been quite public about arming Ukraine). In some ways, the major powers are becoming alike; President Trump’s intrusion in the private sector, Feldstein argues, “shares similarities with Beijing’s economic strategy.” But in other ways, the international scene is diversifying in unpredictable ways, with Iran a leader in drone technology, France and Saudi Arabia vying to win “AI sovereignty,” and old alliances crumbling. This volatility, and the way in which Trump has attempted to press the world into compliance, puts the world in ever more danger of war, the author says. And that war, or those many wars, are likely to be driven by advanced technology, which the nations of the world are scrambling both to develop and to withhold from other nations. One thing seems almost certain, by Feldstein’s account: Current American policies all but guarantee American failure, even as “the prospect of an international agreement limiting the uses of these dangerous technologies is vanishingly small.”
For policy wonks, but with scenarios that ought to frighten just about everyone.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2026
ISBN: 9781250394088
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2026
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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