Henry Kissinger is Associate Professor of Government at Harvard and Executive Director of the Harvard International Seminar. He was also, during 1956-57, director of the Special Studies Project for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. And he is the author of Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. This formidable and serious book, addressed only to the politically knowledgeable, is an attempt to define the major issues of foreign policy that will confront America in the sixties. He deals with the overwhelmingly difficult problems of arms control, the possibility of the reunification of Germany, NATO, the conduct of diplomacy, the concept of limited warfare and the emergence of new nations. It would be impossible to describe here all the ramifications of Professor Kissinger's thinking on these complex issues for he by no means believes that simple virtue and persistence will eventually lead to easy solutions nor does he believe that policy-making can be approached from an attitude of abstraction. He does insist, however, that we have come to the end of the policies and of the men who dominated the post-war period and that the past 15 years can be characterized as a decline for the West. Broadly the direction of the discussion can be indicated: he does not think that the answer to our political problems can be found in reducing our defenses; the problem of NATO cannot be resolved on a national basis; a reunified, neutralized Germany is a feasible proposal; it's impossible to rely on personalities at the Summit; and schemes for arms control should not be considered substitutes for dealing with the political causes of the Cold War. After dealing with these specific policy dilemmas the author then discusses the process of political evolution — in the Soviet Union and the newly emerging nations. And he concludes with an examination of the roles of the policymaker and the intellectual in a bureaucratic system. Unquestionably the book is an important one but it is probably not for general readership.
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 1960
ISBN: 0313243751
Page Count: 370
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1960
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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