by Alasdair Roberts ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2008
A work of rare insight that fills gaps glaringly evident in most public discourse. One minor complaint: The author spends...
A trenchant analysis of the last eight years of American political history.
George W. Bush is usually either lauded as a courageous visionary or damned as an imperialistic ideologue. Rare is the voice that offers sober, balanced assessment, but Roberts (Public Administration/Syracuse Univ.; Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age, 2006, etc.) seems to have found it. Despite a title that suggests another left-wing screed, the book contextualizes the major claims and initiatives of the Bush administration in the light of recent American history. In today’s sprawling and complicated federal government, the author states, even the most far-reaching chief executive is hard-put to make his imprint on domestic and foreign policy. While conventional wisdom says that Bush broke with long-standing American policy by launching a preemptive war against Iraq, for example, Roberts argues that in fact America has been slowly approaching war in the region since halfway through the second Clinton administration, if not as far back as Bush I. To the frequent claim that Bush has expanded executive power in an “Imperial Presidency,” the author counters that the increasingly complex and bloated organism known as the federal government has diminished the presidency as at perhaps no other time in our history. Roberts is far from being an apologist for the administration, faulting it for incompetence, lack of foresight and failure to adapt to changing realities. But America’s problems are much greater than a single person or administration, he contends, which makes solutions that much harder to come by.
A work of rare insight that fills gaps glaringly evident in most public discourse. One minor complaint: The author spends too much time in this slender book rehashing events of the last decades and quoting from other books written about them.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8147-7606-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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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