A wonderfully diverse collection of essays, memoirs, letters, and interviews that comprises a robust spectrum of views on the Kosovo conflict and the NATO air campaign.
Buckley (Ethics/Georgetown Univ.) has brought together contributions from many of the major stars of the international community—UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Vaclav Havel, and Henry Kissinger, to name a few. What makes his collection even more impressive, however, are the pieces from unknown local figures—the Serbian citizens, the Kosovar victims of Serb aggression, and European journalists—who serve to question the realities and perceived realities of the outside observers on both sides of the Atlantic. Ivanka Besevic, an elderly Serbian woman living in Belgrade writes on the NATO bombing: “We are here, and we see it with our own eyes; every civilian target, our neighbors’ homes.” The compilation takes the reader on a tour of the complicated truth behind such simple questions as who exactly the KLA are—without providing any one answer to the perennial question that should trouble Americans most: Was the NATO bombing the right thing to do? If anything, these inquiries highlight just how problematic military intervention is. Was it necessary? The account we are offered of Serb atrocities says the answer is yes. Was it just? Accounts from the Serb perspective, in addition to rigorous political analyses from Kissinger and others tell us perhaps not. Can the peacekeeping operations be called a success? According to Buckley, that remains to be seen. His collection, although it is about as comprehensive as one volume can be, rings with the urgent message that this can be merely the beginning of reflection, analysis, and dialogue on the subject—not the end.
Intellectually challenging but very readable, this examination of the most troubling European turmoil of the last decade is highly recommended for both personal use and professional reference.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8028-3889-8
Page Count: 473
Publisher: Eerdmans
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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