THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 63
1972, the largest of the war, could con
vince the North Vietnamese to rene
gotiate. The young Foreign Service
officer John Negroponte offered a wry
postmortem, which Kissinger never
forgave: “We bombed the North Viet
namese into accepting our concessions.”
Gewen also defends Kissinger’s idea
that every political event anywhere in
the world demands a response some
where else, a view that, in practice,
made every pawn appear to be a threat
ened queen. When Nixon and Kis
singer backed the Pakistani President
Yahya Khan’s genocidal campaign
against East Pakistan, in 1971, they did
so to show the Soviets that America
was “tough.” Four years later, Kissin
ger’s signoff on the Indonesian Pres
ident Suharto’s genocidal campaign
in East Timor was meant to signal
that America would unquestioningly
reward those who had decimated
Communists within their reach. In
retrospect, the notion that everything
America did would be duly registered
and responded to by its opponents
and friends seems like an expression
of geopolitical narcissism. At the time,
the thirtythreeyearold senator Joe
Biden accused Kissinger, at a Senate
hearing, of trying to promulgate “a
global Monroe Doctrine.”
Given Gewen’s insistence on Kis
singer’s realism, it is odd that he does
not dwell more on the most pragmatic
episodes in his career—the pursuit of
détente with the Soviet Union, the
opening of relations with China, and
the development of “shuttle diplom a c y ”
to contain the 1973 ArabIsraeli war—
which are still widely celebrated as
major diplomatic achievements. Dé
tente required Kissinger to prevail over
hardliner views of the Soviet leader
ship as ideologues bent on world dom
ination and to see Leonid Brezhnev’s
Kremlin as populated by rational ac
tors. Instead, Gewen often seems drawn
to defend Kissinger at the points in
his career where defense is hardest. He
opens the book with a long chapter on
U.S. involvement in Chile, which cul
minated in a coup, in 1973. When Chile
elected the socialist Salvador Allende
as President, in 1970, Nixon and Kis
singer resolved to remove him. The
fact that Allende was popularly elected
made him only more dangerous in their
BRIEFLY NOTED
Hell and Other Destinations, by Madeleine Albright (Harper).
This richly detailed memoir by the former Secretary of State
covers the period since her departure from government, in 2001.
With clarity and wisdom, Albright recounts moments of pride,
like receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2012, and
acknowledges recent criticisms of her record, including those
concerning the human cost of the sanctions that the Clinton
Administration imposed on Iraq. Ultimately, the book pres
ents an intricate portrait of a diplomat, and her ardent belief
in democratic values and human rights, transatlantic partnerships
and arms control, and open economies and sturdy institutions.Square Haunting, by Francesca Wade (Tim Duggan). In inter
war London, Mecklenburgh Square, in Bloomsbury, attracted
intellectuals fleeing convention. Many of them were also
feminists, who argued that women, like men, should possess
the “freedom to know.” This powerful collective biography
focusses on five women who, at various times, called Meck
lenburgh home: Jane Harrison, a classics don at Cambridge;
Eileen Power, an economic historian; and the writers Vir
ginia Woolf, Dorothy L. Sayers, and H.D. Just as Harrison
and Power rewrote history to include the lives of forgotten
women, so Wade reëstablishes the importance of thinkers
like Power and H.D., whose legacies have been eclipsed by
those of their male contemporaries.Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami, translated from the
Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd (Europa). “It’s like I’m
in there, somewhere inside myself, and the body I’m in keeps
on changing,” writes one of the main characters in this search
ing, incisive novel, which follows three women in modern
Japan, each facing the possibility of a physical transforma
tion. One grapples with the prospect of finding a sperm donor
and raising a child on her own. Another obsessively researches
breastaugmentation procedures while her daughter, a teen
ager, retreats into silence during puberty. Kawakami, in her
first book to be published in English, considers the agency
that women exert over their bodies and charts the emotional
underpinnings of physical changes—both intentional and
unbidden—with humor and empathy.How to Pronounce Knife, by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Lit-
tle, Brown). In this début collection, fourteen piercing sketches
illuminate the workaday routines and the interior lives of
Laotian refugees. Characters who undertake “the grunt work
of the world,” laboring in poultry plants, hog farms, and nail
salons, also harbor vivid fantasies. Mispronunciations occa
sionally produce brief glimpses of freedom in otherwise
impenetrable places, as when, for one family, the seemingly
meaningless phrase “trick or treat” becomes a magical key
into an upscale neighborhood. In the titular story, a young
girl who accidentally voices the first letter of “knife” moves
from humiliation into defiance, as she feels herself tempo
rarily crossing the boundary between “those who were seen,
and those who were not.”