A useful, readable primer in a specialized but strategically important corner of geopolitics.
Peak oil’s not just a capitalist conspiracy, and Vladimir Putin is vexed and peeved.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, writes Gustafson (Government/Georgetown Univ.; Capitalism Russian-Style, 1999, etc.), the Soviet oil system went with it. In the 1980s, it was the world’s leading producer of oil, but a decade later, production had fallen by half. Oil shored up the system, and by Gustafson’s lights, it made Putin what he is today: Formerly a shabby bureaucrat, once fed a constant diet of oil rubles, his “standard of living clearly improved, even before he became president.” Yet Putin is not the guarantor of a system under which capitalist Russia’s new rich can safely continue to collect billions, for Putin seems to view oil as a means to an end, that end being a well-funded military. “His basic view,” writes the author, “that revenues from oil should be channeled by the state to support Russia’s other strategic industries, remains essentially unchanged from those views he first expressed in the 1990s when he first came to power.” Gustafson notes that the Russian oil economy is at a crossroads, with no clear signal ahead. It might well revert to state control, or it might become a free-market leader, though the likelihood seems to tend in the direction of the former. What seems more certain is that the glory days have passed, since there’s a rule of thumb in oil that the biggest and richest fields have likely been discovered and since production seems destined to dwindle, barring fantastic discoveries in the ever-more-accessible Arctic.
A useful, readable primer in a specialized but strategically important corner of geopolitics.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-674-06647-2
Page Count: 660
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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
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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