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
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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