A thoroughly reported and spryly narrated—and deeply maddening—tour of extreme wealth.
The rich are different from you and me, but the very rich are much alike in squandering money for the sake of conspicuous consumption.
It’s no wonder that at Donald Trump’s second inauguration, billionaires crowded out congressional leaders, for, as New Yorker staff writer Osnos says in this essay collection, “candidates no longer needed large pools of rich supporters; they only needed small pools of ultra rich supporters.” For those ultrarichies, having a politician in the pocket is a small investment, for that way lie tax cuts and thus more money to spend on yachts‚ superyachts, megayachts, and gigayachts. As a measure of the wealth of the 1 percent, Osnos notes, one has only to consider that “the world contains about 5,400 superyachts, and about a hundred gigayachts,” playthings that are in essence floating nation-states, seldom policed since their owners may well be pals with prime ministers and presidents. That so much money is available to so few people has to do not just with tax cuts and other favors, but also with sheer volume: As Osnos notes, “Facebook has as many adherents as Christianity.” So it is that Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and company sail the world. And it’s not just about yachts: As Osnos writes, many of the superrich are convinced that the zombie apocalypse is coming for them, prepping for it by outfitting not just ships but also underground bunkers and safe rooms. Osnos covers a lot of bases here, from (rightful) paranoia to the con games that plague the moneyed class. But those con games seem small compared to the largesse of governments when it comes to that sliver of humanity; as Osnos concludes, only one federal agency has had an indefinite hiring freeze imposed by Trump, and that’s the IRS.
A thoroughly reported and spryly narrated—and deeply maddening—tour of extreme wealth.Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9781668204481
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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
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