by Gary Hart ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 30, 2015
A proactive appeal to restore confidence in the American republic.
A former presidential candidate and senator explores America’s mounting discontent with the nation’s political landscape.
In this loyalist manifesto, prolific author and American diplomat Hart (The Thunder and the Sunshine: Four Seasons in a Burnished Life, 2010, etc.) writes that our nation’s republic has become a “vast and cancerous network” of corruptive lobbyists and policymakers uniformly entwining special interest groups with partisan legislation. The author amply demonstrates personal disillusionment with America’s exclusionary national leadership network and how we have strayed from the original ideals and intentions set forth by the Founding Fathers. “We are not the same country we started out to be,” he laments. A self-proclaimed “political fundamentalist” and staunch proponent for the reformation of the “massively corrupt” congressional structure, the author intelligently appraises government first from a historical context, referencing the Constitution, the ideals of past presidents, Federalists, and even foreign theorists like Machiavelli. He contrasts this with an astute discussion on the decline in moral authority of 21st-century governmental policy and procedure, and he places blame on the country’s foreign entanglements, its accepted “burden of policing the world,” deteriorating social justice, and an imbalance of security and liberty—none of which our pragmatic forebears ever intended. Hart is insistent that the only way to improve our governmental track record is to restrategize with progressive thinking, the reconciliation of current political policies, and a divergence from the concentrated economic powers that have such an undue influence on members of Congress and other politicians. While his recommendations may read as easier said than done, and he doesn’t provide many detailed plans, the book is written with aggressive advocacy and hopeful intentions. Hart’s impassioned plea for reform seeks to empower political compatriots to rethink the direction of U.S. governance, thus closing “the gap between promise and performance.”
A proactive appeal to restore confidence in the American republic.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17523-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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
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