A provocative blueprint for increasing Pakistan’s international status and influence.
A wide-ranging strategy for Pakistan to improve its future as an economic and political power.
Niazi observes that while Pakistan possesses all the “essential ingredients” to become a great economic power—not just on the Indian subcontinent, but also globally—the country “has long suffered from a lack of vision, planning, strategy, and continuity.” To improve the nation’s fortunes, the author outlines a “comprehensive plan” designed to capitalize on Pakistan’s wealth of natural resources, geographical advantages, and infrastructure. At the heart of this strategy is the establishment of a Pakistan Economic Gateway that would connect the nation to the continents of Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia by overland and maritime corridors. This network of routes would not only capitalize on Pakistan’s “key geostrategic location” and enhance its commercial connectivity but also contribute to its food, energy, and climate security. The key here is to leverage Pakistan’s existing supply chain structure in addition to its considerable reserves of copper, cobalt, nickel, and lithium. In this concise but analytically exacting study, Niazi constructs a panoramic recipe for Pakistan’s geopolitical ascendancy, one which includes a somewhat dubious “integrated Eurasian and Indian Ocean strategy” to secure its military and political significance. The brevity of the book is its chief challenge—so much ground is covered so quickly that it’s difficult for any of the positions staked out by the author to register as fully persuasive. It is one thing to observe that Pakistan “must build a credible deterrence against asymmetric and conventional threats,” and quite another to explain exactly how this is to be done, a task the author eschews. However, the notion that the proposed corridors could be the key to financing the nation’s infrastructural development is an enticing stimulus to further thought. At the very least, the reader is left wanting further elaborations upon Niazi’s thoughtful, well-informed proposals, and that makes his creative analysis well worth consideration.
A provocative blueprint for increasing Pakistan’s international status and influence.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9789699748271
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Markings Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
