An optimistic yet realistic call for reform in the interest of repairing what is broken in Washington.
The founder of the Bipartisan Policy Center bemoans political gridlock in Washington, D.C., and suggests common-sense changes.
Grumet started the center in 2007 after lining up two Republican senators and two Democratic senators as his big-name supporters. Two of those senators, Bob Dole and Tom Daschle, wrote forewords for the book. Grumet, the former director of the National Commission on Energy Policy, fervently believes that the massive divide between the two major political parties in the United States can be bridged, and he has been able to marshal effective reform in the areas of immigration law, health insurance and budgetary debates. The author notes that there never really was a golden age of party politics, but as late as the 1990s, philosophically divergent politicians tended to agree that they desired greatness for the country and so eventually compromised enough on the details of legislation. Much of the compromising occurred, Grumet writes, because members of Congress took time to become acquainted personally. Individuals who know each other well, even when acting as sincere policymaking enemies, will gather informally to discuss legislation compromises. Many of today’s policymakers have become so driven to constantly raise campaign money that socializing becomes expendable. As a result, members of Congress meeting in committees or debating in the chambers tend not to know each other well, making it simpler to demonize the opponent and dampening the spirit of compromise—sometimes permanently. Grumet suggests, for example, that members of Congress travel together on fact-finding missions, rather than just political junkets meant primarily to impress constituents back home. A superficial devotion to Congressional ethics has gone too far, Grumet writes, replacing useful fact-finding groups with stay-at-home members who do not reach across political party boundaries to piece together a coherent legislative agenda.
An optimistic yet realistic call for reform in the interest of repairing what is broken in Washington.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0762791583
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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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