Geopolitics wonks will find Marshall’s prognostications to be reasonable, believable, and capably rendered.
The author of Prisoners of Geography(2015) follows up with an elucidating survey of 10 regions whose demographics, economics, and politics will affect the future of the planet.
Geography is not necessarily fate, but it is more important, insists Marshall, than individual politicians. Consider Australia, he writes in the first chapter: It sits 5,000 miles from Africa, more than 7,000 miles from South America, and more than 2,500 miles from its supposed neighbor, New Zealand. The isolation of the island continent once allowed it to maintain a small White settler population and conduct genocidal wars on Indigenes largely unseen. Today, connected by air and sea routes and communication lines, it is “a territorially huge, Western-oriented, advanced democracy” that sits next door to China, “the world’s most economically and militarily powerful dictatorship.” This makes Australia a bulwark. What of Iran? Will it ever become a world power, as it was in the days of Darius and Xerxes? Hemmed in by mountains, “Iran’s main centers of population are widely dispersed and, until recently, poorly connected. Even now, only half of the country’s roads are paved.” This dispersal favors ethnic and cultural diversity, and Iran’s overwhelmingly young population is beginning to resist a fundamentalist ideology “more in tune with the sixteenth century than the twenty-first.” Regional rival Saudi Arabia contains vast resources of oil, a commodity that is increasingly less important than before, so much so that much of the vast sandy peninsula remains unexplored. The U.K. is another region that, Marshall projects, will become less important in world affairs as the U.S. looks to the Pacific rather than Europe. The author also considers the secondary effects of the movement for Scottish independence and, of course, China, with designs everywhere around the world, especially in a developing Sahel—and, significantly, in space, where it is vying with Russia to be the first to build lunar bases.
Geopolitics wonks will find Marshall’s prognostications to be reasonable, believable, and capably rendered.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982178-62-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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