The book succeeds as an encomium to Brooks and his band of pioneering brothers, but misses an opportunity to excel as either...
A tribute to the cadre of black students who arrived at the College of the Holy Cross in the fall of 1968, and to the professor who recruited them.
In the mid-’60s, Holy Cross typically admitted only two black students per year. Convinced that this ethnic homogeneity risked consigning his college to irrelevance in a changing era, the Rev. John Brooks, a professor of theology, set out to recruit promising black students for the class entering in the fall of 1968. Brooks proved to be an extraordinary talent scout. His incoming group of 20 included Edward Jones, who would win a Pulitzer Prize in 2004; Edward Jenkins, who would play for the Miami Dolphins; Theodore Wells, today one of the nation’s premier trial attorneys; and a sophomore transfer student named Clarence Thomas. In this workmanlike debut, Bloomberg BusinessWeek contributor Brady follows this group of courageous young men as they adapted to the challenges of college life in an overwhelmingly white institution and city, and as the college adapted to their arrival. Brooks was a persistent mentor and advocate for these students and their successors in later classes; he insisted that some adaptation was necessary, as the black students “didn’t have the role models in the classroom or the easy comfort of being in the majority.” He argued for extra consideration but not lower standards, encouraging his colleagues to strive “to understand where skin color made a difference, and where it did not.” The actual conflicts that arose as a result of the influx of black students are familiar: demands for more black faculty and students, black studies classes, more scholarship aid, separate black living quarters, a disciplinary process more sensitive to the concerns of students of color. Brady narrates the college’s navigation through these controversies without much further analysis. Similarly, her portraits of various students ably describe their personal struggles without considering which racial issues they confronted may have been unique to the times and which are of persisting relevance.
The book succeeds as an encomium to Brooks and his band of pioneering brothers, but misses an opportunity to excel as either biography or timely history.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-52474-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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