by William M. Arkin ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 28, 2015
This well-informed but quirky analysis of the development of drone warfare and its ongoing effect on the nation's military...
"I see drones and the Data Machine they serve…as the greatest threat to our national security, our safety, and our very way of life,” writes journalist Arkin (American Coup: How a Terrified Government Is Destroying the Constitution, 2013, etc.) in this idiosyncratic survey of the American military's use of drones, from the war in Bosnia to the present day.
The author has access to extensive information about his topic and has mined it to the full, providing a wealth of information. However, this is as much a personal meditation as a careful study, a cri de coeur about what the "illusion of perfect warfare" is doing to our military and nation, all viewed through the unlikely lens of the 4,000-year-old Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. This new approach to warfare, in Arkin's view, means never sending a person into danger if a machine can do the job and reducing civilian casualties and collateral damage to near zero by precision targeting and execution. It requires ever increasing cascades of data and increasingly autonomous surveillance and killing machines through which "every place is reduced to geographic coordinates....nations, armies, and even people are reduced to links and networks.” This renders "the nature of the military…even the nature of our societies very different than they were in the past...[and ultimately] making us less human." The effectiveness of Arkin's argument is undercut by his unruly writing style. A uniformly jaunty tone sometimes lapses into Whitman-esque incantatory passages of obscure meaning; the author piles colorful technological terms into verbal heaps that dazzle or overwhelm rather than inform, and he obfuscates his message with invented words and liberal use of ill-defined personal metaphors.
This well-informed but quirky analysis of the development of drone warfare and its ongoing effect on the nation's military strategy is the latest lament for the disappearance of personal honor and valor from warfare that began in 1914.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0316323352
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“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. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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