It’s a sign of the times that this sensible plea for moderation can seem so radical.
A pragmatic argument about moving politics away from polarities and toward the moderate middle, where the author feels most voters find themselves and most solutions can be negotiated.
The word “manifesto” typically generates more passion, but it’s hard to rouse excitement when espousing a shift toward the center. Yet it’s central to the argument by Wheelan (Public Policy/Dartmouth Coll.; Naked Statistics, 2013, etc.) that rabble-rousing emotionalism is part of the problem in American politics, where candidates in both parties feel that they must throw red meat to the extremists who are more involved in the nominating process than they are reflective of the citizenry at large. Contrary to analyses that see the country as increasingly polarized, the author suggests that most Americans are far more moderate and that they can find agreement on plenty of issues where two-party politics continues to find stalemate or gridlock. “The challenges we have to deal with as a nation are entirely manageable,” he writes. “The key is to mobilize America’s inner pragmatism.” The strategy focuses on the Senate, where a handful of centrist legislators from swing states or a tradition of electing representatives from both parties could become power brokers, essential to the sort of compromise that reflects most Americans. Though third-party candidates haven’t typically fared well, Wheelan argues that the difference here is that the centrists will come from the common-sense middle rather than the radical fringes. Leftists will have trouble swallowing his antipathy toward unions, while conservatives will find his positions on the environment and gay marriage suspect. But as he works his way through flash-point issues to consensus on abortion and guns, he strives for a rationality that all but ideologues can embrace.
It’s a sign of the times that this sensible plea for moderation can seem so radical.Pub Date: April 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-34687-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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