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BLUEPRINT FOR A NEW JAPAN

THE RETHINKING OF A NATION

A master plan for an institutional makeover of Japan from a political insider whose revisionist agenda remains firmly rooted in the ruling class's long-standing preoccupation with national security. A former Liberal Democratic Party shogun, Ozawa became an influential member of the upstart coalition that wrested power from the LDP last year. Aware that his economically formidable country faces a host of new challenges in the postCold War era, he offers a series of proposals at once parochial and visionary for making parliamentary government more accountable, responsive, and responsible on the home front, less hesitant in the wider world. To facilitate effective government action, for example, he would give local authorities greater autonomy, nurture a genuinely competitive two-party system, reform campaign finance, and redraw the electoral map. Noting that the industrious populace has derived precious little improvement in its standard of living from Dai Nihon's prosperity, Ozawa goes FDR one better in stumping for five freedoms (from teeming urban centers, corporate tyranny, overwork, ageism/sexism, and petty regulation). He advocates a shakeup in the nation's rigid educational methods to encourage students to think for themselves in order to help Japanese companies remain innovative players in the global marketplace. Ozawa also calls on Tokyo to become a high-profile source of foreign aid that sets the pace in environmental matters—a worthy ambition for a resource- poor nation that leads the league in slaughtering dolphins and whales. Senator Jay Rockefeller's pious introduction takes no note of such contradictions. Whether Ozawa's deadly earnest call for his fellow Japanese to create a more open society can gain a broad-based readership in the West is an open question. For certain, however, his grand design is in the self-interested tradition of an insular nation-state whose capacity to adapt has not been in serious doubt since the Meiji Restoration. (Maps)

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1994

ISBN: 4-7700-1871-1

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Kodansha

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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GOOD ECONOMICS FOR HARD TIMES

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

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