Lively discussion, occasionally sloppy prose and refreshing candor from two keen observers.
Two accomplished black professionals alternate outspoken, provocative views that revolve around race relations in America.
In frank, chatty conversations, these two Ivy League–educated authors and academics, longtime friends, trade barbs and buzzwords with earnestness, ire and sarcasm. Essence contributor Daniels (Ghettonation: A Journey Into the Land of Bling and Home of the Shameless, 2007, etc.), who was a business journalist at Fortune for a decade, teaches journalism and writes openly about issues of being a mother—e.g., promoting the uncomfortable notion of teaching daughters to enjoy sex and advocating a “mothercentric” workforce as the best way to tackle discrimination and inequality in the country. Cultural anthropologist and filmmaker Jackson (Communication, Africana Studies and Anthropology/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem, 2013, etc.) often plays devil’s advocate in their exchanges. He denounces jazz as a “black, middle-class response to the threat of racial inauthenticity, a trump card rejoinder to the equally problematic assumption that urban poverty is the only thing that legitimately comprises African Americans’ social realities,” and he proposes the establishment of a National Nigger Please Service, which would charge whites to say the N-word so that they could get it off their chests while also funding anti-poverty programs. Needless to say, there is plenty of tongue-in-cheek to these deliberate provocations, as well as lots of engaging reading. Jackson’s prickly essay “I Wish I Could Be a Republican” nicely skewers what he sees as the party’s pro-white, anti-intellectual, pro-gun and anti-Obama stance, declaring that having no shame is actually “quite empowering.” The authors underscore the stubbornly deep divide between black and white, as well as America’s truculent economic inequality, despite the gains of electing the first African-American president. Daniels is especially concerned about the diminishing prospects of social mobility, while Jackson, as a social scientist, sees racial bias as the root of many cultural fault lines.
Lively discussion, occasionally sloppy prose and refreshing candor from two keen observers.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3911-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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