Some penetrating insights, particularly regarding the tension between libertarianism and civic duty. But this is really a...
A former senator exhorts the Democratic Party to lead the recovery from the catastrophic Bush years by returning to its core principles.
United States senator from Colorado (1975–87) and author of 16 books (James Monroe, 2005, etc.), Hart outlines a unified approach to the reconstruction of domestic politics and international relations. He begins with a declaration of defeat in Iraq and the excoriation of the Democratic leadership that supported or condoned the invasion: if only they had listened to the few brave souls, such as himself, who in 2002 were opposing intervention. The Iraq war today is the precise analogue of the final years of the Vietnam War, just as the Bush administration’s outrages against civil liberties, the author says, are akin to those of the Nixon Administration. Indeed, Hart never ceases to draw attention to the relevance of the ’70s, when he began his senatorial career—he would have it that the Democratic Party has done nothing right since. The four great Democratic presidents of the 20th century epitomized the party’s core principles: Franklin Roosevelt, for his defense of community; Harry S. Truman, for his belief in alliance-based internationalism; JFK’s call to civic duty; and Lyndon Johnson’s push for equal rights. In the 1980s, however, the Democratic Leadership Council induced the party to abandon principle in favor of centrist positions and electoral success. Hart acknowledges that the party has suffered in part because it sought to realize its tenets in outmoded ways. “Security,” he suggests, is the umbrella concept that can cover all those principles in the future: security of livelihood, community, the environment, energy supplies and borders. These goals cannot be achieved on just the domestic level, he says—they require the re-integration of the United States into the international community.
Some penetrating insights, particularly regarding the tension between libertarianism and civic duty. But this is really a think piece padded with cliché and bombast.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-8101-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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