Policy wonks and activists will find much to ponder in Baer’s lucidly argued platform.
A diplomacy expert examines four large areas the U.S. must negotiate if the nation is to endure as a democracy.
Baer posits that the U.S. faces a “polycrisis” made worse by the fact that so many in the polity have given up faith that anything can be done about such things as political polarization and climate change. The author proposes four multipronged approaches. The areas include the problem of scale, which effectively asks, in a world of population decline and bars to immigration, whether the America of today will remain large enough to hold a leading position in the current global pecking order. Neither alarmist nor complacent, he suggests that “the U.S. must adapt to a future in which it has less coercive power over other states,” sensible enough given that many of the existential threats we face are not exactly political, but instead demand international coordination and cooperation. Building scale means having the people to do it, which means an immigration policy that encourages a continued flow of new Americans to contribute. That in turn opens up onto the question of how to fund the education necessary for innovation in a time when education is both defunded and scant resources are directed to wealthier white districts—and this when “the majority of people under age sixteen in the United States identify as nonwhite.” Against a confluence of negative megatrends, Baer’s tests of what he calls scale, investment, fairness, and identity don’t defy solution, but they resist easy ones: “There is no single policy, no awakening, no cultural shift that can address any one of them.” Yet we must “take a leap of faith” because, he concludes, “In the end, really, what choice do we have?”
Policy wonks and activists will find much to ponder in Baer’s lucidly argued platform.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781668006580
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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