Bumpy but rich with surprises.
New Yorker contributor Alford (Big Kiss: One Actor’s Desperate Attempt to Claw His Way to the Top, 2000, etc.), who is also a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, braids interviews with personal vignettes in his search for the meaning of life.
Meet 97-year-old Granny D., who walked 3,200 miles across America for 14 months to support campaign-finance reform. And Eugene Loh, an 87-year-old retired aerospace engineer who spends his days rummaging through dumpsters for browning bananas. And Ashleigh Brilliant, America’s premiere aphorist, responsible for penning 10,000 quips such as, “I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.” They are just a few of the colorful characters whose lives the author probes in his quest for wisdom. Drawing from books, psychologists, philosophers and his many interviewees, Alford runs their disparate insights through a sieve. “Wisdom is slippery,” he says. “It comes in many forms and guises. Sometimes it is intermingled with a certain amount of unwisdom.” Interviewing such personal heroes as playwright Edward Albee and spiritual guru Ram Dass, he plunders the vaults of others’ experiences, comparing notes and weighing everything against his own worldview. Is wisdom a product of experience? Is it the property of thinkers like Epicurus and Confucius? Does wisdom boil down to simple proverbs? These are the questions that Alford tackles without a map, but with objective curiosity, humorous verve and scholarly diligence. His mother’s unfolding crisis becomes a catalyst and the book’s anchoring story line. After 36 years of marriage, she divorces the author’s stepfather, whose addictive personality and depression force her to make serious late-life choices. Selling the house, she packs up her cow-themed bric-a-brac collection and moves from Massachusetts to a retirement community in North Carolina near one of her daughters. Her unique—and uniquely American—variation on the universal phenomenon of aging will appeal to almost every reader, as will her son’s familiar internal struggles. Taking a lighthearted approach, Alford discovers that wisdom is a process rather than a fixed point.
Bumpy but rich with surprises.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-19603-1
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
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