Sure to provoke a good deal of hissing as well as applause.
The highly visible attorney seeks “to influence, in a positive direction, [the] discernible shift away from bipartisan support for the Middle East’s only democracy and America’s most reliable ally.”
Never one to shy away from attention, Dershowitz (The Case Against Impeaching Trump, 2018, etc.) has always liked a good argument, and he has found plenty of fodder in Israeli policies over the decades. Mostly, he has taken on the role of “defending Israel in the court of public opinion,” mainly in terms of defending Israel’s security and right to exist. The author writes clearly about how important the founding of the state was to him and his Zionist family: “There was never a time that Israel was not part of my consciousness.” In the late 1960s and early ’70s, Dershowitz was a part of many hot-button cases, including those involving anti-war protesters and capital punishment. (Later, of course, he was part of the “dream team” assembled to defend O.J. Simpson in his murder trial.) In fighting for Israel on the public stage, the author has often condemned the legitimization, by some elements of the political left, of Palestinian aggression—yet he also defends “the right of those who demonized Israel…to express their hateful views.” This distinction of basic civil rights has become personal in recent years, as students on college campuses have attempted to ban Dershowitz from speaking engagements. While the author maintains that “criticizing Israel’s settlement and occupation policies is fair game,” he is appalled by the disproportionality of world condemnation, as was expressed in the 2008 Goldstone Report by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, which Dershowitz skewered. Recently, he writes, “the degree of condemnation and demonization is all out of proportion to what is warranted,” especially regarding what he sees as a “new anti-Semitism” sweeping American campuses. Unbowed and proud, Dershowitz leaves readers with a singing endorsement of “the most successful new nation that has been born—really reborn—during the past century.”
Sure to provoke a good deal of hissing as well as applause.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-17996-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: All Points/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2019
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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