A noted economist argues that deep reforms are needed to bring renewed prosperity to the United States—a nation “dangerously out of balance,” where a tiny elite holds wealth and power without regard for their fellow citizens.
Known for his studies of economies in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, Sachs (Healthy Policy and Management/Columbia Univ.; Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, 2008, etc.) weighs in for the first time on America’s economic ills. Drawing on diverse studies and surveys, he characterizes the U.S. as a competitive market society in which “the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty, and compassion toward the rest of society and toward the world.” From the New Deal through the 1960s, the federal government steered the national economy for the public good. But in the ’80s, power shifted to special interests, whose concern was private advantage, leaving the U.S. economy vulnerable to the 2008 collapse. To restore prosperity, writes Sachs, America must once again have an activist government that works within the market system to create a more balanced economy and a society based on social trust, honesty and compassion. The author writes that most Americans support such reforms, but are misrepresented in Congress, where both parties enact policies “to the right of the public’s true values” to please wealthy contributors. Sachs considers the effects of such forces as globalization, social change and media saturation, and shows how national consensus dissipated as a result of the civil-rights movement, the upsurge in Hispanic immigration, the rise of the Sun Belt and suburbanization. Like social scientist Raj Patel (The Value of Nothing, 2010), Sachs writes that we must abandon the craving for wealth and create a more mindful society. A lucid writer, the author is refreshingly direct—tax cuts for the wealthy are “immoral and counterproductive”; stimulus funding and budget cutting are “gimmicks”—and he offers recommendations for serious reform. An important assessment of what ails America, and a must-read for policymakers.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6841-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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