Australian lawyer and journalist Dapiran, a longtime resident of Hong Kong, gives a commanding firsthand account of the recent—and ongoing—protests there.
The author opens by first noting how freely Hong Kong police were in deploying tear gas to counter the seemingly unending chain of demonstrations that enveloped Hong Kong in 2019—in November, at a rate “approaching two rounds for every single minute of the day”—and how bravely the demonstrators fought back. As with the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989, the protests were touched off by a seemingly minor event, the question of whether an accused murderer sheltering in Hong Kong should be extradited to Taiwan, where he had committed his crime. That event gave rise to a broad-based discussion of whether the government in Beijing would observe the jealously guarded rights of the former British colony. “The year 2019 may be remembered as the year that defined post-handover Hong Kong; China’s answer to that question will determine whether 2019 will also be remembered as the last year of Hong Kong as it once was,” Dapiran writes. Beijing talks a good game of honoring those rights while taking an active role in trying to sway elections and inserting undercover soldiers and police on the streets, all the while attempting to avoid a Tiananmen-like crackdown at the cost of its international high standing. Dapiran argues that the 2019 protests were the continuation of the earlier “Umbrella Movement” of 2014. By implication, the author, who breathed in plenty of tear gas himself while monitoring them, suggests that the protests are likely to begin anew until Beijing honors the terms of the “One Country, Two Systems” model with which it has been trying to woo Taiwan to reunify—and he would seem to endorse the protestors’ claim that they “were freedom fighters not only for their own city, but for the world.”
Excellent reportage that is of critical importance in understanding contemporary Chinese politics.Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950354-27-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribe
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
Categories: CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | WORLD | POLITICS | POLITICS | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL NONFICTION
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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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“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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