The author’s extensive knowledge of Washington allows him to ably illustrate our remarkable political history, and he renews...
The days of political camaraderie are over, writes Washington Post columnist Dionne (Foundations of Democracy and Culture/Georgetown Univ.; Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics after the Religious Right, 2008, etc.), who nonetheless offers some possible correctives to the current poisonous political climate.
The clash between Republicans and Democrats, writes the author, has devolved into the struggle of individualism versus community, local versus national and the Right versus the Middle. Philosophical boundaries are tilted, and moderates are now often painted as left wing. Rampant historical revisionism divides us. Dionne decries interpretations of the Founding Fathers’ intentions by the courts as well as politicians; originalists have little basis to claim definite knowledge of the intentions of the framers of the Constitution. Knowing that the Constitution was a work in progress that would grow and adapt to the times, they continued to argue, balance and compromise. Hamilton, Clay, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt used republican nationalism to better the American community. The communitarian reforms of the New Deal established the idealistic American Century. Now the resurgence of radical individualism threatens to dissolve those reforms. Populist methods are the favored tool to promote individualistic objectives and attack the elites, especially Wall Street. However, it is not so much that the wealthy have too much; it’s that they have failed in their stewardship of our economy. The men who founded our country were elites and elitist. The difference is that those founders knew that they also had a social obligation to provide for the common good. Dionne condemns the current partisanship as destructive and demands the return to moderation, balance and compromise.
The author’s extensive knowledge of Washington allows him to ably illustrate our remarkable political history, and he renews our hope that cooler heads can prevail with a renewed balance of individual rights and the needs of the community.Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60819-201-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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