Next book

AMERICAN CONSERVATISM

RECLAIMING AN INTELLECTUAL TRADITION

Eloquent if tendentious historical snapshots of the conservative tradition in American thought.

A collection of essays and speeches—mostly from the 20th century—that argue tacitly that today’s conservatism needs an intellectual reboot.

Bacevich (The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory, 2020, etc.), who served as an officer in the Army, doesn’t include any of his own work in this wide-ranging volume. In the introduction, he makes patent his anti-Trump attitude, calling the president a “sleaze, narcissist, chronic dissembler, unscrupulous tycoon, [and] tax cheat.” The book is arranged thematically, and each section comprises pieces organized chronologically. Most of the contributors, drawn from a variety of disciplines and eras, are familiar: William F. Buckley Jr., Walter Lippmann, Whittaker Chambers, Reinhold Niebuhr, Zora Neale Hurston, John Crowe Ransom, Wendell Berry, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Joan Didion, Antonin Scalia, Milton Friedman, and Shelby Steele. The unspoken theme of many pieces is that conservatism once had a scholarly, articulate, even elitist foundation, but anyone who peruses today’s news knows that this has evanesced. Also present throughout the book are themes that have long occupied conservative thought: American power and war, anti-communism, religion in public life, isolationism versus intervention, regional rights, and free markets. In an essay from 1947, James Burnham argues that while race is a significant issue in America, it is not nearly as bad as it would be under a totalitarian regime. Unfortunately, many of the Southern writers ignore slavery and Jim Crow in their discussions of liberty. Also troubling: A number of writers urge the reining in of what they see as hurried social changes, a position that seems to suggest a desire to maintain the status quo. Bacevich acknowledges that most of his contributors are white males, but he doesn’t want to “falsify history” by including minority voices that were not prominent thinkers during their eras.

Eloquent if tendentious historical snapshots of the conservative tradition in American thought.

Pub Date: April 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-59853-656-0

Page Count: 500

Publisher: Library of America

Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 22


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Next book

WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 22


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2016


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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

Next book

GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

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

Close Quickview