Liberty is fortunate to have such a reasoned and persuasive voice as its champion.
A sharp examination of the idea of liberty in the modern, democratic state.
Fried (Constitutional Law/Harvard) begins his discussion by offering “three gentle challenges,” three seemingly benign, democratically approved modern laws—Quebec’s Charter of the French Language, Canada’s government-funded medical system, Vermont’s anti–Wal-Mart regulation—and asks whether they constitute objectionable impositions on liberty. Each of these examples offers an eminently defensible “vision of the good” to compensate for any liberties denied. All three provide excellent instances of the questions inherent in the author’s distinctively modern consideration of liberty. He first examines ideals that compete with liberty—beauty and equality—then widens the lens to include notions of liberty and rights, including contract, property, states’ and natural rights. A particularly arresting chapter discusses sex, an anarchic force that governments perennially try to regulate while people see such regulation as “an offense to liberty even greater than governments’ attempts to control what they think, say, and hear.” Fried fulfills his pledge to make this “a book not for lawyers or academics, but for human beings” by presenting with humor many contemporary examples that make difficult concepts easy to grasp. It’s a tribute to the author’s seriousness and good will that he makes a strong and vigorous case for both sides of each argument before finally finding all three cited laws offensive to our liberty. This conclusion will surprise few familiar with the politics of the former Solicitor General of the Reagan Justice Department, but even those predisposed to disagree will find it hard to counter his rigorous arguments.
Liberty is fortunate to have such a reasoned and persuasive voice as its champion.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-06000-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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