Skeptics and critics of military overreach will find Arkin’s argument invaluable.
A national security expert indicts the current American conduct of its “forever war.”
As former NBC News analyst Arkin demonstrates, America’s “endless” wars are perpetual by design and sustained by “a gigantic physical superstructure.” It’s gigantic enough, in fact, that the U.S. has an overbuilt military that, while capable of projecting martial power far from the nation’s shores, is not constructed to meet the demands of the wars that it will likely be fighting. “Our way of war,” writes the author, an Army veteran, “and our style of warfare has never been well suited for this counterterrorism fight.” For that reason, he adds, much of the brunt of the fighting is borne by proxy armies staffed by contractors, and those wars often multiply. At any given time, he writes, American forces are engaging enemies not just in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in numerous nations in Africa. The power of enemies there, as well as in North Korea, is vastly overestimated, by Arkin’s account. Whereas the Pentagon reckons that North Korea is “the largest artillery force in the world,” the author estimates that its presumed “21,000 howitzers and artillery guns” really amount to about 600 “that both function and can reach Seoul in a surprise attack.” In addition to pointing out the problems, Arkin proposes reforms—e.g., stronger civilian oversight over the military in a time when the institution has become accustomed to operating without it. Oversight implies control, and that requires the training of arms-control and nuclear-weapons experts who are “knowledgeable enough to challenge the generals and the status quo.” Another intriguing idea is a “global security index.” In the manner of a stock ticker, it gives constant, publicly available updates on real threats to the U.S. to guide military deployment—a use of force made all the more problematic, notes Arkin, by the pandemic.
Skeptics and critics of military overreach will find Arkin’s argument invaluable.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982130-99-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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