An eye-opening walk on the not-so-wild side with members of the Yakuza, Japan's 400-year-old crime syndicate. A freelance writer who is fluent in Japanese, Seymour lived and worked in Tokyo during the early 1990s. While there, he gained entree to several of the city's top mobs (gumi), subsequently connecting with gangs in Kyoto and Osaka. The author traces the underworld's roots back to 17th-century shogunate era, when itinerant gamblers preyed on the countryside. Following the Meiji Restoration (in 1867), gangsters forged links with nationalist politicians that endure to this day; they now effectively have control of the rackets—drugs, extortion, prostitution—and certain legitimate enterprises, such as gambling, nightclubs, sports, and street vending. The rigidly hierarchical Yakuza is an integral, if not precisely honored, part of Japanese society. On the evidence of Seymour's text, however, the way of the Yakuza underbosses and soldiers is neither very lucrative or exciting. While he kept close company for many months with dope dealers, gun runners, and loan sharks, they might as well have been nose-to-the-grindstone salarymen during daylight hours. Nor does there seem to be a yen's worth of difference between the two retired godfathers the author met and top corporate executives. After sundown, younger members of the outlaw bands become appreciably livelier in their pursuit of pleasure with the mainly Western and Filipina women they have turned out as carriage-trade call girls. Also intriguing are the macabre rituals of the Yakuza. Among other quaint customs, these career criminals who seldom murder rivals, let alone civilians, have massive tattoos burned into their skins (with bamboo slivers) as proofs of manhood and unit pride. While Seymour gamely tries to invest his Asian thugs with drama, he's too good a journalist to glamorize them or their surprisingly mundane lives. In consequence, the Yakuza (though celebrated in its homeland's B films and tabloid press) is still waiting for a Mario Puzo.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87113-604-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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