A brilliant exploration of democracy as it is and as it should be.
The noted British political and economic philosopher examines modern democracy and finds it—well, not very democratic.
Democracy, Churchill once remarked, is the worst form of government except for all the others. Grayling agrees, holding that democracy along the “Westminster Model,” which includes the U.K. and, in modified form, the U.S., “is either dysfunctional or in danger of becoming so as a result of the model’s essential weaknesses.” Both the U.K. and the U.S., he adds, are the most pronounced examples of its failures because both have become thoroughly politicized—and, he notes, “government is not the place for politics. Politics is the place for politics: in election campaigns, in the negotiations to form government, in the public debate in general.” When government is politicized along party lines, someone doesn’t get represented, and the foremost goal of a democratic state is representation for all and the opportunity for everyone to flourish. This is far from the case, writes Grayling, since too many people are excluded from the benefits of the state “as a result of political and economic choices made by those who still get control of the levers respectively of government and economic activity.” Rather than monolithic party rule, the author favors broad-based parliamentary coalitions, which further the goal of arriving at a majority opinion “composed of the overlapping Venn diagrams of a sufficient number of minorities.” He is particularly disparaging of the “first-past-the-post” system that has taken over both the U.S. and the U.K., which leaves voters for the losing side without a voice in governance. Fortunately, to trust Grayling, there are ways to reduce politics in government and get democracy back on the road to functioning properly, even if the powers that be will surely struggle against any such reversion to the ideal.
A brilliant exploration of democracy as it is and as it should be.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78607-718-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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