Useful ammunition for an argument on gun rights at the bar or dinner table.
A thoroughgoing survey of that most troublesome of constitutional matters.
Recent court decisions, from the lower municipal to the highest in the land, have held the Second Amendment right of gun ownership to be sacrosanct, never mind that pesky “well-regulated militia” bit. The National Rifle Association, for its part, has argued that the Second Amendment is the most important in the Bill of Rights, protecting all others. But, writes Lichtman (History/American Univ.; The Embattled Vote in America: From the Founding to the Present, 2018, etc.), Founding Father James Madison didn’t see it that way: He held instead that “the ‘essential rights’ are trial by jury and freedom of conscience, speech, and the press.” Past interpretation of the amendment did in fact connect it to the militia, subsequently replaced by the National Guard and therefore, in theory, rendered moot. Instead, as Lichtman enumerates in just one statistic, nearly 24,000 Americans die of gun suicide, something that rarely happens in other developed nations with strict firearms codes. As he notes, our constitutional right to keep arms is shared only with Guatemala, “whose gun murder rate is the third highest of some 195 countries worldwide”). The NRA was once a responsible hunters’ organization. Since the 1960s, not coincidentally the civil rights era, it has become a lobbying firm that protects arms manufacturers’ interests by battling any efforts at gun control—and not just here, but also in places such as Canada and Brazil, the latter of which “has by far the most firearms homicides and deaths of any country in the world.” As for Americans, we are far more likely to be murdered by gun than a resident of any of the G7 nations—more than 20 times per capita, in fact, adding Australia to those nations. What can be done? Short of repeal outright, Lichtman sensibly suggests strengthening background checks, limiting gun sales, and holding gun manufacturers legally accountable for the nefarious uses of their products.
Useful ammunition for an argument on gun rights at the bar or dinner table.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-25-024440-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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
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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