An accessible primer on the evolving China–U.S. rivalry.
An exploration of one of the world’s most significant and fraught international relationships.
Rudd, CEO of Asia Society and the former prime minister of Australia, employs his considerable diplomatic experience to analyze Xi Jinping’s aggressive approach toward the world stage. The author sets out a readable cautionary tale, warning of the dangers of mutual distrust between China and the U.S. as well as the follies of the “Thucydides Trap,” described by historian Graham Allison as “the natural, inevitable discombobulation that occurs when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power.” As Rudd amply demonstrates, Xi, as a kind of neo-Mao, is actively stoking the “depressingly familiar, ancient alchemies of xenophobia, nationalism, and political opportunism.” The author calls for new “rules of the road” for the two powers to navigate, and he shows the roots of the conflict in China’s suspicion of foreigners, regarded as culturally inferior and irrelevant, and the stance of the American government, which, despite its avowed anti-colonialism, has often disregarded China as an equal trading partner and pursued aggressive, patronizing policies toward China. After World War I, for example, “America’s status, in the eyes of China’s emerging political class, collapsed overnight from national savior to spineless hypocrite.” Rudd surmises that Beijing sees the relationship as a transactional one while the U.S. has viewed it as “transformational, carrying with it the deeper objective of changing the fundamental nature of Communist China itself.” This has not happened, of course, and the author walks us through Xi’s “ten concentric circles of interest,” which include the widespread consolidation of power, national unity, unfettered economic growth, “securing China’s maritime periphery in East Asia and the west Pacific,” and even “rewriting the global rules-based order.” Where Xi is perhaps most vulnerable is in environmental policy or a situation in which cracks develop in the seemingly endless economic expansion plan.
An accessible primer on the evolving China–U.S. rivalry.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5417-0129-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
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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