An intelligent guide, but a problematic response, to the contradictions that plague global democracies.
An examination of the dilemmas confronting capitalist democracies and the role that politics can play in managing them.
Capitalist democracies achieve legitimacy and become stable when they deliver equality, solidarity, security, and prosperity to their citizens. Ansell notes that these aspirations involve trade-offs, and striking the appropriate balance requires democratic politics. Neither the market nor technology alone will suffice. Only politics can negotiate between equal rights and equal outcomes, solidarity and individual preferences, collective security and the concentration of power to achieve it (anarchy versus tyranny, according to the author), and both short-term and long-term prosperity. What makes these challenges—what Ansell calls “traps”—daunting is that democracy itself is rife with opposing tendencies, pitting the mythical “will of the people” against irredeemable self-interests and making chaos and polarization ever present threats. “Political economy,” writes the author, “lets us ask and answer questions from the micropolitics of our everyday life—how will I feel about funding public pensions when I buy a house?—to the macropolitics of everyone’s life—does rising inequality threaten our political stability? It does so by assuming people are broadly the same—politicians and voters, rich and poor alike—and face the same temptations and traps.” The achievement of collective action, he tells us, is the “spectre that…haunts” the book. Ansell considers numerous substantive issues, including climate change (“humanity’s hardest political problem”) and its relation to prosperity, national health care with regard to the solidarity trap, and the wealth tax and its consequences for equality. The emphasis on “traps” skates close to the dialectical thinking of Marxist analyses, and Ansell is unwilling to interrogate his liberal intellectual beliefs, which weakens his claim that institutional politics are the solution. The author also wrestles, not wholly successfully, with the balance between the rigor of an academic perspective and the readability of popular nonfiction.
An intelligent guide, but a problematic response, to the contradictions that plague global democracies.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781541702073
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.
Another chapter in a long fight against inequality.
Building on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, which this year drew 280,000 people to rallies in red and blue states, Sanders amplifies his enduring campaign for economic fairness. The Vermont senator offers well-timed advice for combating corruption and issues a robust plea for national soul-searching. His argument rests on alarming data on the widening wealth gap’s impact on democracy. Bolstered by a 2010 Supreme Court decision that removed campaign finance limits, “100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion” on 2024 elections. Sanders focuses on the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, describing their enactment of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” with its $1 trillion in tax breaks for the richest Americans and big social safety net cuts, as the “largest transfer of wealth” in living memory. But as is his custom, he spreads the blame, dinging Democrats for courting wealthy donors while ignoring the “needs and suffering” of the working class. “Trump filled the political vacuum that the Democrats created,” he writes, a resonant diagnosis. Urging readers not to surrender to despair, Sanders offers numerous legislative proposals. These would empower labor unions, cut the workweek to 32 hours, regulate campaign spending, reduce gerrymandering, and automatically register 18-year-olds to vote. Grassroots supporters can help by running for local office, volunteering with a campaign, and asking educators how to help support public schools. Meanwhile, Sanders asks us “to question the fundamental moral values that underlie” a system that enables “the top 1 percent” to “own more wealth than the bottom 93 percent.” Though his prose sometimes reads like a transcribed speech with built-in applause lines, Sanders’ ideas are specific, clear, and commonsensical. And because it echoes previous statements, his call for collective introspection lands as genuine.
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798217089161
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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
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