An essential contribution to the literature of politics and diplomacy in the Middle East.
A veteran foreign policy scholar explores the ups and downs in the complex friendship between the U.S. and Israel.
“There are few subjects in American foreign policy that get as much attention as the relationship between the world’s only Jewish state and the global superpower,” writes Mead, author of God and Gold and Special Providence, among other trenchant works on the far-reaching tentacles of American foreign policy. Even so, much of that literature is biased and wrongheaded. In the complicated business of foreign policy, writes the author, “even experts go badly wrong, and history is full of examples in which very serious and thoughtful people have fundamentally mistaken the nature of the forces with which they were trying to deal.” So it is with Israel, a nation resolute in insisting that it be allowed to live on its own terms even while being closely shepherded by the U.S. In Mead’s view, the idea that Jews somehow secretly control the U.S. government and media, to say nothing of its finances, is not worth discussing. Far more important is the seemingly intractable issue of political balance in the always-volatile region, with American political leaders so often favoring close ties with authoritarian Arab states even as dollars-and-cents–minded policymakers have had to negotiate ways to “ensure the security of the oil producers…so that no single power had the ability to interrupt the oil flow.” A nuclear Israel has complicated that already tangled state of affairs even as an aggressive settler regime under Benjamin Netanyahu has further destabilized regional relations. Writing fluently and with a depth born of decades of study, Mead urges that Israelis and Palestinians work harder to achieve ever elusive peace in the region, holding that “the creation of a Palestinian state will move both sides closer to a mutually acceptable accommodation.”
An essential contribution to the literature of politics and diplomacy in the Middle East.Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-375-41404-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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