Excellent reading for students of contemporary geopolitics and recent American history.
A former U.S. ambassador to Russia and career Foreign Service officer delivers a resounding defense of American diplomacy and the need for negotiation in a non–zero-sum world.
Diplomacy involves considerable skills that seem little in evidence in the current White House, requiring of its practitioners “smart policy judgment, language skills, and a sure feel for the foreign landscapes in which they serve and the domestic priorities they represent.” There is also the matter of what Burns, now the president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, calls “strategic adaptation,” the ability to read the winds and adjust course to accommodate the tack one’s interlocutor is taking. Consider Vladimir Putin, a man who leaves Burns unimpressed. By the author’s account, Putin was none too happy when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, and part of his program seems to be to get both up and running again. At the same time, for all his wiles, Putin is capable of misreading situations, as he certainly did after 9/11, when the Bush administration proved “indifferent to Putin’s calculus, and generally disinclined to concede or pay much attention to a power in strategic decline.” Some of the most newsworthy elements of this book, in fact, involve how the State Department crafted a response to 9/11, if one that largely went ignored. One might understand how Putin might feel inclined to angle for an American leader who would serve his interests. Enter Donald Trump. If Burns is evenhanded and careful, glad to praise Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton alike for their successes in service, he clearly reckons Trump to be a disaster for American foreign policy. Still, he persists: Burns believes that “diplomacy is one of our nation’s biggest assets and best-kept secrets. However battered and belittled in the age of Trump, it has never been a more necessary tool of first resort for a new century.”
Excellent reading for students of contemporary geopolitics and recent American history.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50886-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
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
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