In this accessible text, a noted economist makes a case for a healthier global economy and shared rules and principles to support it.
A globalized economy requires free trade agreements and an absence of barriers and tariffs. Yet, as Rodrik (International Political Economy/John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Univ.; Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science, 2015, etc.) notes, many nations that have benefited from those trade agreements haven’t quite played by the rules, such as the towering economy of China and the smaller one of Vietnam, while countries that do abide by the rules and rely on free trade, such as Mexico, have suffered. Given that globalism has provided a powerful bogeyman for Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen (who promised to dissolve the European monetary union if elected president of France), among others, an irony is hidden in all this. While “the global dissemination of democratic norms from the advanced countries of the West to the rest of the world has been perhaps the most significant benefit of globalization,” it is precisely in those advanced countries that democracy seems most endangered. Rodrik ventures that the idea of a “free market” is itself problematic, inasmuch as in the U.S. there has historically been a great deal of government infrastructural and financial support for private initiatives, with companies such as Apple and Intel benefiting from federal largesse in their early years. The author makes a point of distinguishing free trade and fair trade as two different things, with fair trade combatting protectionism while also restraining globalizers “from gaining the upper hand in cases in which international trade and finance are a backdoor for eroding widely accepted standards at home”—a living wage, say. Though Rodrik allows that some trade agreements can stand structural revision, he suggests that the developing world will not be a sufficient source of innovation to lead the global economy in the future.
A thoughtful, reasoned argument, of much interest to students of globalism and its discontents.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-17784-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
11
GET IT
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 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
Did you like this book?
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...
GET IT
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. 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
