Not an exciting account but a solid record of a terrifically significant public career.
A methodical memoir of a long, top-level government career developing nuclear deterrence strategy.
The former secretary of defense during President Bill Clinton’s first term, as well as an accomplished Stanford University scholar, Perry straightforwardly tracks his life’s journey in terms of a growing awareness that the only defense against nuclear attack is “to prevent the attack from happening.” Too young to serve in World War II, the Pennsylvania-born math whiz was barely 18 when he enlisted as an Army engineer and observed firsthand the bombing devastation of postwar Japan. The rise of the Soviet missile threat defined his early years of graduate work at Stanford, which were followed by a job as a senior scientist at Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories. An original entrepreneur in Silicon Valley with his own company, Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory, and dedicated to Cold War intelligence work using new digital technology, Perry was plucked by Harold Brown to serve as his undersecretary of defense for research and engineering in 1977. He gradually began to see that the old way of thinking about keeping up with the Soviets and ensuring an “offset strategy” was outdated, “a colossal failure of imagination.” What was needed was diplomacy—e.g., dealing with China, NATO, and Israel-Egyptian peace talks at Camp David. A critic of the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Star Wars, Perry actively participated in nongovernmental international diplomacy, Track II, to develop new paths of understanding with Russian scientists and academics. When he returned to Washington, D.C., in 1993, Perry was in a unique position to deal with the dismantling of nuclear weapons left as the legacy of the Cold War, enforced by Nunn-Lugar legislation. Perry recounts tackling one containment crisis after another during his tenure, from North Korea to Bosnia to Haiti. Having worked so hard to neutralize the Soviet–U.S. relationship, Perry is especially anguished at the new tension with Putin’s Russia.
Not an exciting account but a solid record of a terrifically significant public career.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9712-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Stanford Security Studies/Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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