A thoughtful call for equality of economic opportunity, both provocative and, in the end, eminently practical.
An exposé of the many barriers marginalized people face in gaining access to the so-called American dream.
“We claim that we live in a land of opportunity, when in fact we have systematically denied opportunity for centuries,” writes Fuhrer, a foundation fellow at the Eastern Bank Foundation. The myth of the title is less a single yarn than the tangled mass of threads that comprise systemic racism in economic life—though if it were to be reduced to a single falsehood, it’s that each of us has the same opportunities to work and grow rich. It should be no surprise that the playing field is anything but level and that “the array of policies that were designed to build wealth for white families” is largely unavailable to anyone else. For individuals, the inequalities begin in childhood, with a huge differential in the accessibility of pediatric health care and educational and social support systems for early childhood development to minority and white populations. One of many hurdles, writes Fuhrer, is that the years of early childhood care tend to be the years of lowest earning, which means that the ability to borrow funds is constricted and the need for assistance greatest. A free-marketer fundamentalist may be shocked by Fuhrer’s program of remedies. Apart from increasing access to day care programs, for example, he recommends installing “school-to-work educational programs” that would serve as pipelines by which individuals with the necessary skills are steered from community college or trade school to jobs, with the costs borne by taxpayers and industry alike. He also recommends raising the minimum wage and, to make that possible, giving large tax breaks to the small businesses that might otherwise be harmed by the cost burden. Following Fuhrer’s tally sheet will surely make a libertarian blanch, but it’s an interesting back-of-the-envelope exercise in balancing costs and return on investment.
A thoughtful call for equality of economic opportunity, both provocative and, in the end, eminently practical.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780262048392
Page Count: 384
Publisher: MIT Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
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