Superb writing, subtle thinking. Just the thing for politics junkies and journalism buffs, especially those wondering who...
One of American journalism’s brightest intellectual lights shines forth in a fine—and long overdue—selection from four decades of work.
Borrowing his title from that of Dwight Macdonald’s left-leaning, mid-20th-century magazine, Hertzberg—who, as David Remnick notes in his foreword, is now “the political voice of The New Yorker”—offers a nicely catholic definition of what politics encompasses and who makes politics tick. In that vein, he opens this overstuffed anthology with a piece describing the San Francisco sound for Newsweek readers not yet hip to the scene, instructing them that the audiences for the likes of the politically astute Grateful Dead include people just like them, “like the crew-cut blond boy in chinos and poplin jacket, whose brunette date wears a plaid skirt and knee socks.” Newsweek didn’t run the essay, in which Jerry Garcia makes pronouncements worthy of Talleyrand (“Language is almost designed to be misunderstood”), but no matter: Hertzberg follows it with a generous sampling from the ’60s era, including pieces that hit on Woodstock, the Weather Underground, and the invasion of Cambodia, before moving on to his stride-hitting analyses of mainstream political culture. Organized thematically, these pieces visit and revisit actors and motifs. All are marked by Hertzberg’s touching insistence that humans are rational creatures and that our politics ought to reflect as much. Thus the fuss over Gary Hart’s dalliance with Donna Rice, way back in the pre-Monica days, is hurtful because it “diverts our attention from public questions; it makes us respond inappropriately and disproportionately”; thus the war on drugs emerges as a “costly jihad”—just the right word—that “has scared off some casual users, but it has done nothing to reduce the number of hard-core addicts”; thus the sitting president’s way of catching lucky breaks makes for an especially maddening spectacle: “The fact that the 9/11 terrorists gave Bush what he could not earn on his own, a political majority, deepens the bitterness.”
Superb writing, subtle thinking. Just the thing for politics junkies and journalism buffs, especially those wondering who merits wearing Izzy Stone’s mantle today.Pub Date: July 13, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-018-1
Page Count: 670
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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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