The author is not much of a prose stylist, but he gives enough historical evidence to back the theory that political and...
Thoughts on how “alternative institutions” could revamp American society.
Using his own experience of starting a car-sharing program as a leaping-off point, Metcalf takes readers back to the years prior to the American Revolution to begin his analysis of how and why alternative institutions are once again needed in the United States. Although the narrative is textbook-dry—he outlines what he plans to examine, covers that material in depth, and then sums it all up—Metcalf does offer solid examples of cycles of change in this country. From the early days of the country, he studies worker co-ops, analyzes “mission-driven investments and progressive consumer demand,” and discusses companies that demonstrate his points. The author looks at the pros and cons of land trusts, particularly the Champlain Housing Trust in Vermont, and explores other housing situations. Metcalf notes that money is usually the limiting factor in community and conservation land trusts, but they also require like-minded people who are more interested in maintaining the land for generations rather than generating short-term profit through privately owned property. The author also features agricultural cooperatives and provides a short history of sharecropping as well as a study of the emergence of the Farmers’ Alliance in 1879, the Seattle General Strike of 1919, and the advent of the sustainable food movement. Metcalf uses these historical markers to illustrate some of the key components of alternative institutions: they should solve the immediate problems people face in their daily lives; they should provide a direct route for political organizing; and they should network with one another, creating a larger pool of similarly minded members. Although alternative institutions can’t fix everything, Metcalf believes they can help transform society, and many readers may agree.
The author is not much of a prose stylist, but he gives enough historical evidence to back the theory that political and social change are in the hands of activists willing to make a stand against conventional practices.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-137-27967-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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
BOOK REVIEW
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
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