Some readers may not be convinced, but this book deserves a broad audience, especially in our current political climate.
George W. Bush’s secretary of state returns to her academic roots with this accessibly written study of that imperfect but ideal form of government.
The United States is strongly and customarily identified as the democratic power par excellence. However, urges Rice (No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington, 2011, etc.), now a professor in the business school at Stanford University, democracy is not an exclusively American province, nor is there compelling reason to believe that other nations cannot enjoy the freedoms it affords. Having witnessed at close hand the Arab Spring and the fall of the Soviet Union, the author examines several avenues leading to democratic formation, including the collapse of a totalitarian regime that leaves an “institutional vacuum,” one capable of being filled by democratic agencies that may be weak at first, as well as the development of a quasi-democracy that may evolve into a more truly democratic system. In the latter instance, she writes, meaningfully, “an executive with too much power, ruling by decree and circumventing other institutions, is a sure path to authoritarian relapse.” The remark is evidently directed to the likes of Vladimir Putin and other autocrats, but much of Rice’s conversational and sharp book can be read as a quiet rebuke of the current occupant of the White House, who is no friend to the small-d democratic establishment in which Rice long made her career. Generally speaking, the author seems optimistic about the eventual odds of the world following the “path to liberty.” Even so, she warns that there are many obstacles and impediments to democratic progress, with challenges such as inequality, “stalled social mobility,” and particularly a lack of educational opportunity for the poor, education being key to democratic development in the first place, as the Founders well knew. Along the way, Rice offers a conditional defense of externally imposed regime change in Iraq.
Some readers may not be convinced, but this book deserves a broad audience, especially in our current political climate.Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5997-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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