Of considerable interest to China watchers and human-rights activists.
Thoughtful reportage on the small campaigns of resistance to state rule that are springing up throughout China.
Huge portions of Beijing are now being scraped away, the 600-year-old terracotta-tile roofs and cobblestone streets replaced by glittering skyscrapers in the name of economic modernization. That is an offense to preservationists, one of whom observes that “Beijing’s value is as a whole. . . . It was like Jerusalem, a complete medieval city.” It is a worse offense to the thousands of Beijing residents displaced by urban renewal; their property has been condemned and declared almost worthless, then sold out from under them for the equivalent of millions of dollars—and by the government. The long-suffering Chinese people may have once put up with such fraud and theft, writes Wall Street Journal Berlin bureau chief Johnson. But in the wake of government efforts to modernize the state with “a legal system that can keep order nationwide,” which has led to an explosion of lawmaking, ordinary citizens are using the courts and other judicial channels to fight back—vigorously but mostly without success. Johnson profiles three cases: the efforts of activist Fang Ke to save old Beijing from a government “bent on destroying everything but a few small corners of the old town, turning them into tourist zones”; a small-scale farmers’ rebellion on the Loess Plateau, protesting oppressive taxes and the brutal tactics used to collect them; and—perhaps most interesting to Western readers—the Chinese government’s battle to declare the religious movement called Falun Gong a dangerous cult. (The author won a Pulitzer in 2001 for his reporting on Falun Gong.) Johnson’s defense of Falun Gong, which blends calisthenics and meditation to improve both health and moral righteousness, is compelling, his rejection of the government’s efforts to equate movement leader Master Li with Jim Jones well argued. “Fundamentally,” he writes, “what was often forgotten in the learned discourse was that the government, not Falun Gong, was killing people.”
Of considerable interest to China watchers and human-rights activists.Pub Date: March 23, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-42186-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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