Though Wolfe sometimes wants to have it both ways and may be too trusting of the motives of elites, this is a persuasive and...
A withering broadside against the immaturity that infests American politics, revealing itself in populism and demagoguery.
Both the left and the right take it on the chin in this tough-minded analysis by Wolfe (Emeritus, Political Science/Boston Coll.; At Home in Exile: Why Diaspora Is Good for the Jews, 2014, etc.), who has written 22 books. It is not the author’s aim to merely assail the unreasoning, petulant behavior of Donald Trump and his “base,” which is like shooting fish in a barrel. Clearly, Wolfe abhors the president and finds him dangerous yet only a symptom of the disease. What he investigates is why, with all the potential leaders available to them, the American people elected a manifest incompetent. Though his book is very much about the collective childishness of American political discourse, the title is somewhat misleading. It is not just petulance that infects our politics, but also a plague of misguided populism and demagoguery that feeds on ignorance, fear, and a persistent current of racism. While some readers may question the author’s conviction that politics is one of the noblest of human enterprises—“an efficient and beneficial way of holding a society together” without its various parts waging war against each other—his contention that we do not take our political responsibilities seriously enough is inarguable. “Responsible politics cools down rather than heats up,” writes the author, contrasting today's intellectual malaise with a golden age (1940s-1950s) of political thought in America represented by the writers Wolfe calls “the mature liberals.” Some were home-grown, others intellectuals and scholars who immigrated to the U.S. after World War II, well acquainted with what demagoguery had wrought in Europe. Though fierce anti-communists in the main, they were a bulwark against the vituperation of America's most notorious demagogue, Joseph McCarthy.
Though Wolfe sometimes wants to have it both ways and may be too trusting of the motives of elites, this is a persuasive and alarming book.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-226-55516-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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