Solid reading for students of economic development and global economics.
A report from the front lines of inequality and corruption in India, one of the world’s rising economies.
It’s not the Taj Mahal, but it’s got two-thirds of the floor space of Versailles—and on a footprint of just an acre. Former Financial Times Mumbai bureau chief Crabtree considers the Mumbai apartment tower built by billionaire Mukesh Ambani to be the pre-eminent symbol of “the power of India’s new elite,” one that pointedly emphasizes the sharp divide between rich and poor in the country—and indeed, the divide between the merely rich and the superrich. The creation of a class of hyperwealthy commoners owes at least in some measure to domestic economic reforms meant to advance a free market but that, instead, in combination with modernization and globalization, ushered in an era of staggering corruption, with the government machinery simply unable to keep up with a wave of crony capitalism. “The 1991 reforms,” writes the author, gave “Indians a taste of a new world of mobile phones, multi-channel television and foreign consumer goods.” They also inaugurated an enthusiasm for globalization that is largely unmatched; most Indians, Crabtree asserts, are all for it. However, support for globalization does not necessarily mean support for the greatest beneficiaries of it; anti-corruption campaigns are increasingly commonplace. Yet state apparatus is too inefficient to do much about it. As Crabtree notes, there are so many layers of bureaucracy that a would-be entrepreneur has to negotiate that it’s only natural for a businessperson to try “to strike a deal towards the top of the decision-making chain.” Corruption has not moderated under the “big-government conservative” Narendra Modi, who, Crabtree foresees, will in his second term yield to the temptation to substitute nationalism for economic reform, following the path set by Putin in Russia and Erdogan in Turkey. Even so, writes the author, it is not inevitable that India become “a saffron-tinged version of Russia.”
Solid reading for students of economic development and global economics.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6006-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Tim Duggan Books/Crown
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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