Take it from Drakulic: Ordinary people suck.
Croatian expatriate Drakulic (S., 2000, etc.) offers a philosophically charged indictment of onetime Yugoslavians now standing before the International War Crimes Tribunal.
Ordinary people do not commit monstrous crimes; and because we are ordinary people, we could not have committed monstrous crimes in the past. So goes the human impulse to explain away atrocities; so goes the refusal, throughout the former Yugoslavia, to admit that something horrible happened not so very long ago. “But once you get closer to the real people who committed those crimes,” writes the Croatian expatriate Drakulic, “you see that the syllogism doesn’t really work.” Ordinary people do indeed do terrible things. Sitting in a courtroom in The Hague, Drakulic searches their faces and their files for signs of madness, an explanation for their deeds as something other than a sick response to peer pressure or a cosmic dare. (Explaining why those 80 or so men—and a couple of women—shed their ordinary lives to become killers is of paramount importance, Drakulic holds, because otherwise they will be eulogized as war heroes back home.) Their trials are dull matters, she admits, a far cry from the witty back-and-forth of Hollywood film, but from them bits and pieces of truth emerge. Some of the killers are pathological, likely murderers in peacetime or war, but otherwise the proverbial guy next door; in the title essay, one defendant, in his mid-20s at the time of slaughtering more than a hundred people in a single month in 1992, remarks, “It is nice to kill people this way. I kill them nicely. I don’t feel anything.” Others, such as the former Yugoslavian leader Slobodan Milosevic, killed (or had others kill) out of ambition: in Milosevic’s case, it appears that he thought war would keep him in power. Others were bureaucrats, anxious to please the boss. Still others merely went with the flow. And thousands died.
Take it from Drakulic: Ordinary people suck.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03332-4
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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