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THE EURASIAN CENTURY

HOT WARS, COLD WARS, AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

Thoughtful and disturbing.

World history since 1900, with an emphasis on geopolitics.

Brands, Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author of Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict With China, reminds readers that Eurasia, Earth’s largest landmass, remains the world’s strategic center. When the modern age began, its powerhouse was Western Europe—until the post–World War II recovery of Japan and breathtaking rise of China pulled the economic center of gravity east. The first of Brands’ five long chapters introduces Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947), an obscure British civil servant who excelled in explaining geopolitics, a discipline focused on the relationship between land and political power. Mackinder emphasized that maritime nations like his own could pursue positive-sum strategies in trade and cooperation, whereas continental powers existed in cramped, cutthroat conditions where the surest route to safety was to conquer your neighbors. What follows illustrates this unsettling theme. World War I was so searing that no democratic statesman wished to repeat it, but it left many potential troublemakers. The big winner, the United States, acted as though geography guaranteed its security, although it did not. Learning from its mistakes, after 1945 “the United States pursued a generous, positive-sum vision of cooperation” and oversaw 80 years of peace and unrivaled prosperity. Sadly, peace and prosperity aren’t a priority among autocrats. “They want glory, greatness, and empire.…By late 2023, both Eastern Europe and the Middle East were ablaze,” and few doubt the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Today, a return to history’s horrors is all too plausible. Americans need to learn the lessons of the first Eurasian century if they are to survive the second. A fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Brands delivers a worshipful portrait of President Reagan but approves of liberal democracy as opposed to “would-be authoritarian” Trump, making a convincing case that democracy is in trouble.

Thoughtful and disturbing.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025

ISBN: 9781324036944

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

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BEYOND THE GENDER BINARY

From the Pocket Change Collective series

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.

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Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.

The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.

A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)

Pub Date: June 2, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5

Page Count: 64

Publisher: Penguin Workshop

Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020

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