by James K. Galbraith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 2014
A cleareyed, if dismaying analysis of the new normal, “a qualitatively different form of capitalism” for the 21st century.
A renowned economist argues that the days of easy growth and full employment are over.
Following the crisis of 2008, economists scrambled to “explain” the financial meltdown, variously blaming the government, banks or income inequality for the most severe setback since the Great Depression. Almost all have offered prescriptions for restoring economic health; almost all presume as normal a growth rate that, but for a blip in the 1970s, has persisted since the end of World War II. Galbraith (Government/Business Relations/Univ. of Texas; Inequality and Instability: A Study of the World Economy Just Before the Great Crisis, 2012, etc.) dissents. Throughout his discussion, he slaps around economists from the left and right, chiding them for their insularity, their reluctance to widen their perspective and their unwillingness to concede that their theoretical models rest on radically transformed ground. We face a far different future, he insists, with the world economy no longer under the financial or military control of the United States and its allies, with energy markets costly and uncertain, new technologies destroying more jobs than they create and the private financial sector no longer supercharging growth. Under these new conditions, preserving post-WWII growth rates is impossible. Instead, the most we can hope for is an era of “slow growth,” engineering the economy “to grow at a low, stable, positive rate for a long time” and adjusting ourselves “materially and psychologically to that prospect.” Some of Galbraith’s remedies are likely to draw fire—increase social services, decrease the scale of the military, increase the minimum wage—but his forceful prose and admittedly provocative suggestions invite argument. General readers may find some of his discussion a bit too insider-y, but students of economics will enjoy the robust, fearless rebuke he delivers to some of the discipline’s giants.
A cleareyed, if dismaying analysis of the new normal, “a qualitatively different form of capitalism” for the 21st century.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1451644920
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
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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