Not necessarily for general readers, but a must for policymakers.
An optimistic forecast for the future of American innovation.
Despite the rise of China and India as economic powers seeking advanced technology, the United States will “play a dynamic role in the new world of globalized innovation,” writes Segal, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. In recent years, America’s technological lead has eroded as a result of flat spending on basic research, declining science and engineering enrollments and other factors, most notably the rise of Asia. China, for example, is pushing to the forefront of nanotechnology is already the world’s largest exporter of high-tech products. But many policymakers have overblown the Asian threat, writes Segal, ignoring or underestimating many of the factors that go into innovation. In particular, Asia lags in developing the new talent and the organizations and relationships (between academe, government and business) that sustain innovation. Although booming, education in China and India is producing engineering and science graduates who often lack practical, analytical and teamwork skills. Progress in both nations is also slowed by state controls and bureaucracies. To boost innovation at home, the United States must revitalize connections between universities and industry, encourage technological entrepreneurship and build more collaborative communities of scientists and entrepreneurs. The author stresses the need for American scientists to maintain close ties with Asia, where more and more scientific advances will occur. “In this era of collaborative and globalized innovation,” he writes, “companies and countries are inextricably dependent on ideas and talent from the outside.” Segal offers many suggestions to help encourage the design of effective policies to bolster “the creation, commercialization and spread of novel ideas.” By exploiting its “comparative advantage—an open and flexible culture and a web of institutions, understandings and relations that move ideas from the lab to the marketplace,” the United States can remain a force in innovation and may even produce technological discoveries that spur recovery from the current recession.
Not necessarily for general readers, but a must for policymakers.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-06878-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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