A skillful assessment of the transformation of nuclear weapons from the so-called guardians of our security during the Cold...
The foremost historian of the birth, growth and spread of nuclear weapons examines developments in the post–Cold War era.
Since the publication of The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1987), which won nearly every major book award, Rhodes (Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race, 2007, etc.) has owned the story of nuclear weapons. If this concluding volume in his nuclear history is slightly less impressive than its predecessors, it may only be that we’re still too close to the events for any observer, even one as informed and eloquent as the author, to finally judge all that has unfolded during the past two decades. A series of set-pieces brings the story up to date—South Africa’s pursuit and eventual dismantling of its nuclear arsenal, the Clinton administration’s negotiations with North Korea to dismantle its nuclear program and the arms race between Pakistan and India. Rhodes devotes the bulk of the narrative, however, to two stories: Iraq’s secret bomb program under Saddam Hussein—and the costly miscalculations that led to the second Gulf War—and the era’s signature event, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the mostly successful attempt to secure the Soviet nuclear arsenal as republics within the old empire declared independence. The author approvingly quotes an expert who calls the removal of nuclear weapons from Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan “the single most important accomplishment of the 1990s.” Although Rhodes includes a section on the frightening potential for nuclear terrorism, he delivers a surprisingly upbeat verdict on the future, noting that “more nations gave up their nuclear ambitions during the 1990s than sought to acquire those weapons of terror and mass death,” and predicting that within his grandchildren’s lifetimes “possession of a nuclear weapon will be judged a crime against humanity.”
A skillful assessment of the transformation of nuclear weapons from the so-called guardians of our security during the Cold War to the burden and catastrophic threat they pose today.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26754-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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
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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