An earnest but uneven work ultimately undermined by its ending.
A passionate defense of capitalism as the only system that can guarantee individual rights.
In the introduction to this slim volume, Sidhu (They Don’t Kiss in the Movies, 2005) criticizes conservatives and liberals alike, saying he’s searching for an alternative path. He then proceeds to outline an objectivist history of the United States, addressing a wide range of topics that include the Declaration of Independence, slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow laws, religion, poverty and monetary policy. The author rejects the concepts of civil and human rights as superfluous, saying that capitalist democracies already afford individual rights to all citizens. According to Sidhu, unfettered capitalism would set things right and take care of any discrepancies. For example, an employer who refuses to hire a qualified candidate due to some type of discrimination would eventually pay the price due to unsound, illogical business practices; the government, the author says, shouldn’t intervene in such situations. Although his opinions may not please all readers, he maintains clarity and restraint throughout most of the text. However, readers may find the book loses credibility in the seemingly tacked-on final section, “Part Four: Current Events,” written before the elections of 2012, which features an alarming diatribe about President Barack Obama: “I agree with Dinesh D’Souza that his actions are deliberate, meaning that he could be safely accused of trying to destroy the country’s economy.” Even Michelle Obama doesn’t escape criticism: “She can barely contain herself in talking of her slave ancestors in speeches to the black public.” The book also targets other familiar suspects in conspiracy theories involving the Federal Reserve, the United Nations and the Environmental Protection Agency. While criticizing the lack of objectivity in the mainstream media, the book makes the following questionable assertion: “Only the Fox News channel is immune to this partisan behavior.” After this, many readers may have difficulty taking the rest of the book seriously.
An earnest but uneven work ultimately undermined by its ending.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1480901667
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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