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began to see that the old way of thinking about keeping up with the Soviets and ensuring an “offset strategy” was outdated, “a colossal failure of imagination.”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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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