by Amy Alexander ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2011
Perceptive regarding the fractures within the journalism industry, but at times pedantic.
A consideration of how the mainstream media has grappled with race over the last 20 years.
Veteran journalist Alexander (Fifty Black Women Who Changed America, 1999, etc.) uses her own career as a lens for critically examining the industry’s efforts toward diversity, and how those efforts are faring through the Internet-era upheaval of newspapers and print media. She fears that the middling gains made by people of color in journalism since the 1990s have been eroded: “financial challenges in the news business are diminishing the numbers of talented, experienced reporters and editors of color.” Alexander sees many ominous trends, noting, for instance, that even though more reporters of color cover the White House, suggesting a more diverse era, “the Obama administration’s arrival coincided with the downward spiral of legacy news organizations.” She combines this argument with a look back at her own experiences in print, radio and online journalism. The author is most engaging when she provides incisive overviews of insider topics such as the Boston Globe plagiarism scandal involving Patricia Smith and Mike Barnicle, which seemingly represented a racial double standard, and the media mergers which she argues have made equitable minority representation even more difficult to attain. In wrestling with two difficult subjects—the challenges faced historically by people of color in the American news media, and the recent usurpation of traditional journalism by the Internet—Alexander writes with a clearly felt sense of passion and urgency, and she thoughtfully discusses key events of the last few decades, such as the Rodney King incident and its aftermath and the questionable role of media stars during traumatic events such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake. However, because long sections are devoted to her CV and personal travails, the author’s return to these central themes becomes unwieldy, creating a book that’s neither true memoir nor social polemic.
Perceptive regarding the fractures within the journalism industry, but at times pedantic.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6100-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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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