For all its limitations, a worthwhile contribution to an important discussion.
A plan for tax reform that aims to relieve American workers of undue financial burdens and restore the nation’s competitiveness as a manufacturer.
Despite being an “economic powerhouse,” the United States “has managed to lose much of its manufacturing prowess,” and most low-tech production has taken flight to other countries like China, observes Olsen. We cannot simply accept an economy that runs singularly on services, he asserts. “We need to make more of our own things.” Much of the problem lies in the tax code, per the author, which seems to punish the average American worker—the linchpin of the nation’s economic competitiveness—and reward risky financial speculation. To remedy the problem, Olsen lucidly proposes a sweeping tax reform plan and suggests adopting a single-payer national health care plan and a “Child Sustenance Assistance Service.” The money to pay for these programs and tax cuts will come from taxing stock market and real estate speculation, the latter of which, according to the author, not only artificially raises housing prices but also destabilizes communities (these are provocative points argued with impressive analytical rigor). Olsen’s approach is free of any partisan rhetoric or ideological axioms; in fact, he roundly criticizes both communism and free-market capitalism as “too mechanistic.” At the heart of the book is a stirring paean to the nobility of work and the central significance of the American worker to the economy as a whole. (“A foundational principle of America is that the economy’s very purpose is to serve the needs and aspirations of the American workforce.”) This is a very brief book—well under 100 pages of main text—and such a quick treatment of so many complex issues can’t be decisively persuasive. The author’s discussion of alleviating poverty is particularly vague, and seems to amount to little more than hiring more case managers. However, the true value of this slim volume is that it stimulates further discussion by offering a perspective often neglected—one that places everyday workers, rather than disruptive entrepreneurs, at the top of the nation’s economic hierarchy.
For all its limitations, a worthwhile contribution to an important discussion.Pub Date: April 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781734233254
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Breaking Wave Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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