A top-notch, highly accessible contribution to the business and popular economics literature.
Now that the tide of outsourcing employment has begun to turn, the time has come to think about how to reverse chronic unemployment among youth in the United States.
Newman (Sociology/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; The Accordion Family: Boomerang Kids, Anxious Parents, and the Private Toll of Global Competition, 2013, etc.) and Winston (Investigative Journalism/Brandeis Univ.; Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels, 2005) note that economic cost structures have changed, as large corporations—e.g., Wal-Mart (which will buy “an additional $250 billion in US-made products over the decade that began in 2013”), General Electric, and Apple—are working to bring jobs back home. But what kinds of jobs will they be, and who is qualified to take them? Well-paying jobs, for workers with the right kinds of skills, remain unfilled even now, but 50 percent of youth are unemployed. Therefore, expansion of technical education must be on the agenda, argue the authors. In the U.S., however, vocational/technical schools are often viewed as inferior to traditional four-year colleges or even a dumping ground for those without futures. The authors compare America's practices with those in Germany and Japan. In Germany, where youth unemployment is 7 percent, there is no such cultural stigma. Corporations, government, and labor all work together to develop curricula and training programs to qualify potential workers, and they offer long-term employment stability and high wages. Newman and Winston point out that America's manufacturing prowess used to be the envy of the world, but the stigma against technical education helped to erode that status. Reviewing America's attempts to establish a consistent framework for vocational and technical training, the authors document the negative consequences of warping youth's ambitions against skilled employment. The upcoming presidential election makes this a vital time to bring these questions, not otherwise addressed in this way, to the fore.
A top-notch, highly accessible contribution to the business and popular economics literature.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62779-328-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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