by David Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 5, 2000
Friendly teasing of the mandarins of the Information Age—infectiously funny, but seldom getting under the skin or drawing...
A lighthearted morphology that traces the evolution, mating rituals, and nervous system of a new group of social animals: the bourgeois bohemians (“Bobos”) who arose from the affluent educated class and reconciled the counterculture values of the 1960s to the entrepreneurial energies of the 1980s.
The collapse of the WASP Establishment, beginning in the 1950s, left a vacuum for a new hierarchy that would be more ethnically inclusive and meritocratic. The culture wars of the next few decades ended, according to journalist Brooks (the Weekly Standard), with a fusion of the mainstream organization man and the artistic rebel of unconventional morality. “The grand achievement of the educated elites in the 1990s was to create a way of living that lets you be an affluent success and at the same time a free spirit rebel.” Often sporting such unusual job titles as “creative paradox,” “corporate jester,” or “learning person,” Bobos work with monklike selfdiscipline because they view their jobs as intellectual and even spiritual. The world of the Bobos is tolerant, quiescent, intellectual but worldly, and instinctive. At the same time, Brooks (admitting his own membership in this caste) cheerfully underscores their many paradoxes and contradictions: for example, although they mistrust authority, Bobos haven’t hesitated to exercise control through campus speech codes and stricter zoning requirements. Like Tom Wolfe, Brooks can toss off nifty neologisms like “Latte Towns” (upscale liberal communities, often universitybased, that are fueled by gourmet coffee) and “StatusIncome Disequilibrium” (young intellectuals’ resentment that their income doesn’t match their professional achievements). Yet Brooks can neither achieve brilliant comic heights achieved by the observer of “radical chic” and “The Me Decade,” nor back his viewpoint with the spine of sharp reporting that informs even Wolfe’s fiction.
Friendly teasing of the mandarins of the Information Age—infectiously funny, but seldom getting under the skin or drawing blood. (First serial to Newsweek)Pub Date: May 5, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85377-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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
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