A game of Risk between hard covers. Endlessly fascinating—but endlessly weird.
A sometimes strange, sometimes Strangelovean white paper destined to top policy-wonk reading lists in the months to come—especially if, as the author suggests, the Pentagon is taking it seriously.
“I am proposing a new grand strategy on a par with the Cold War strategy of containment—in effect, its historical successor,” writes Barnett (Naval War College). That strategy is hydra-headed, but at the start it involves recognizing which of the world’s countries are part of the Functioning Core, signed on to the globalization club, and which are part of the Non-Integrating Gap, “largely disconnected from the global economy and the rule sets that define its stability.” (Barnett is fond of Capitalized Concepts.) By this sharp division, a broad equatorial swath across the planet, comprising sick and troublesome nations such as Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, lies beyond the pale of Euroamerican reason, whereas Russia, Chile, and, perhaps surprisingly, China are to be counted as allies, real or potential, and even friends. One of the tasks for the US, Barnett writes, is to develop what he calls “a reproducible strategic concept” by which to guide the military in global actions, reproducible meaning one on whose terms Democrats and Republicans can largely agree. “Trust me,” Barnett breezily writes, “the military wants this sort of bipartisan consensus in the worst way.” Such repurposing is necessary if we are to set an example for the rest of the civilized world, which seems disinclined to subscribe to our rule set. The Strangelove element comes in when Barnett makes extramilitary policy recommendations, as when he urges that a component of Western foreign aid be to encourage “the widespread use of bio-engineered crops,” demands the removal of Kim Jong Il from power in North Korea (an inevitability, Barnett says, if Bush is reelected), and prophesies that the US will admit many new states in the next 50 years—including Mexico.
A game of Risk between hard covers. Endlessly fascinating—but endlessly weird.Pub Date: May 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-15175-3
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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