With a riveting story, Katz has demonstrated inspiring courage in embarking on a path to rediscover his childhood...
A deep exploration and personal journey of a Holocaust survivor through the root causes and consequences of extraordinary evil in a village in Germany–and around the world.
Katz takes us on two very different personal paths to examine the contribution of ordinary German citizens in supporting the systematic extermination of their Jewish neighbors. In this final installment of his trilogy on the roots of state-sanctioned evil, Katz travels to his hometown of Oberlauringen in southern Germany to confront his own terrifying childhood experiences. Growing up in such a chaotic environment–-where the eradication of Jews was glorified in marching songs–-so traumatized the young Katz that for 30 years he could not speak even his native language, German, or even acknowledge his Jewish heritage. Living in Israel was the catalyst that activated these dormant issues and set him on a life-affirming journey to reclaim his past. Returning to his village, he encountered universal silence surrounding the treatment of Jews under Hitler. The sole exception was his babysitter, who sheltered and fed Jewish townspeople against government orders. The encounters fueled his search for answers to such phenomena, which launches him on his second, more dispassionate journey as a sociologist. Here, Katz reiterates and amplifies the concepts of riders, local moral universe and immediacy, all introduced in his previous two works, Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil (1993) and Immediacy (2003). He successfully applies his framework to the analysis of recent events such as the Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel and the tragedy of 9/11, stating that fervent moral certainty in the service of a greater good or a better afterlife was the primary motivating force behind these extraordinary acts of evil.
With a riveting story, Katz has demonstrated inspiring courage in embarking on a path to rediscover his childhood experiences and to use his scientific knowledge to find tentative solutions to curtailing the evil tendencies within each of us.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7914-6030-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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