Of interest to students of economic history, though less intellectually compelling than David Warsh’s Knowledge and the...
Yale economic historian Garten (The Big Ten: The Big Emerging Markets and How They Will Change Our Lives, 1997, etc.) looks at 10 pioneers of the new global economy, from Genghis Khan to Deng Xiaoping.
Both Genghis and Deng were inarguably of great importance in opening up the worlds they knew to global, or at least continental, trade. Perhaps more important than Genghis was his descendant Kublai Khan, who built an actual rational economy and the bureaucratic structure to administer it, achievements that, writes Garten, “occurred well after Genghis Khan, but…evolved from his earlier attempts at establishing a multicultural society spanning vast territory.” Robert Clive, aka Clive of India, on the other hand, simply found a multicultural society spanning a huge territory and appropriated it for the British crown—one way to open up markets, to be sure, but perhaps not the best model for latter-day capitalists to follow. Without Prince Henry the Navigator, the Portuguese royal who spent money on science and education, Garten writes, the great Age of Exploration would have probably occurred anyway, “but it was Henry who seized the moment.” This rather offhand defense points to the central problem of the book: it lacks much explanatory power. The 10 individuals highlighted here, though their contributions were of importance to varying degrees, might just as easily have been replaced by any other 10 leading individuals—e.g., Genghis for Kublai, Andrew Grove for Steve Jobs, and so forth. That objection noted, Garten does well to highlight the different strains of enterprise that have gone into making a global economy, from military intervention to exploration and the innovation of financial and technological systems. He also makes the smart, though arguable, assertion that “globalization has given individuals powerful new avenues to make an impact.”
Of interest to students of economic history, though less intellectually compelling than David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (2006) or even Robert Allen’s Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (2011).Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-240997-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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