Covers ground already chronicled in the memoirs of the principals, to say nothing of the Mueller Report—but still worth a...
Is there a deep state? If there is, writes New York Times columnist Stewart (Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America: From Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff, 2011, etc.), then Donald Trump is definitively a member.
James Comey was a good foot soldier for the FBI. Yet, when the 2016 election was heating up, he made one tactical error after another, especially by planting the suggestion that Hillary Clinton had engaged in illicit behavior when using a private server for official emails. We now know that the State Department has exonerated Clinton, but in 2015, the jury was still out. Meanwhile, other actions on the parts of FBI officials were consternating: Andrew McCabe’s wife, for instance, was running for office in Virginia as a Democrat and had received a sizable donation from that party, causing a Republican stalwart to fulminate that it could not be interpreted as “anything other than a down payment to influence the FBI’s criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.” After Trump entered office, Comey presented him with uncomfortable evidence linking him to prostitutes—evidence inconveniently videotaped by Russian intelligence. McCabe was not long in falling himself after suggesting that he knew that Trump had lied about his reasons for firing Comey. This is all well known to anyone who followed matters as they were happening, heavily reported in papers. A value added is that Stewart looks closely at questions surrounding the affair, asking whether Comey’s actions cost Clinton the election and answering that her “decades of obfuscation…led some voters to doubt Clinton’s integrity and truthfulness, including her claims about the emails.” Granted, Comey departed from policy by criticizing her handling of the matter while not recommending charges against her. Was Comey a Trump foe, as Trump so loudly complained? No, for the FBI’s case file concerned not Trump but, initially, four of his associates who proved to have direct ties to Russia—three of whom “ended up being indicted or pleading guilty to crimes.”
Covers ground already chronicled in the memoirs of the principals, to say nothing of the Mueller Report—but still worth a look.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55910-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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