Thoughtful and disturbing examination of slippery ideas, rendered in powerful prose.
Intriguing exploration of the social construct of “home” and its relevance to gender rights and racial equality.
Hill (Social Policy, Law, Women’s Studies/Brandeis Univ.; Speaking Truth To Power, 1997) fuses elements of memoir, legal studies, history and polemic in this compact work. She suggests that the ongoing housing crisis is the latest cruel twist upon the celebrated “American dream” of home ownership, and “a tragic turning point in the search for equality in America”. Hill examines a variety of narratives, including her own family history as the great-granddaughter of a slave. This leads to a chilling account of the lynching era in the Jim Crow South, which ironically strengthened black communities, who “shared a collective interest in avoiding racial violence.” The author emphasizes the transformative roles of African-American women, who felt compelled to “establish their place in the communities where they settled, and thereby advance the race.” While early black leaders like Booker T. Washington stressed the connections between achieving a home and a fuller citizenship for blacks in the early 20th century, suffragists like Nannie Burroughs were criticized for “promoting black women’s independence from black men.” But Hill looks as far back in American history as Abigail Adams to underscore that American women’s understanding of the potency of home as a space for protection and social advancement transcended color and class. Yet this seemingly remained out of reach; Hill notes, for example, how the New Deal’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation actually “gave its financial blessing to segregated neighborhoods,” and how “postwar housing policies... affirmed racial segregation and the cult of domesticity.” The author examines disgraceful attempts by Wells Fargo and other banks to promote high-risk subprime home loans in beleaguered minority communities.
Thoughtful and disturbing examination of slippery ideas, rendered in powerful prose.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1437-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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