A sharp warning to corporations that deep pockets and armies of accomplices won’t stall a reckoning forever.
A savage satirical stab at corporate malfeasance draws blood.
Jacquet, the director of XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement at NYU and author of Is Shame Necessary? takes an original approach to indicting the ethical vacuum that besets much of big business. The author presents a “training” manual for corporate CEOs on how to fight against science, supplant it with disinformation, and undermine all efforts to regulate industry. Jacquet’s well-informed narrative details avoidance and attack strategies so thoroughly that it offers a blueprint (for the uninitiated) for precisely the sort of skulduggery she deplores. However, her juicy rip of corporate culture and the callous disregard that affects us all effectively nails bad actors to the wall. The political climate of the Trump period, especially the surge of climate change denial, prompted Jacquet to study the tactics used by corporations to thwart, corrupt, or discredit scientists. She is a fine reporter, chronicling a history of misdeeds on the parts of not only pharmaceutical, chemical, radium, tobacco, and dozens of other industries, but some ongoing campaigns, all with the evidence to back it up. Refreshingly, she is unafraid to name names. Jacquet likewise exposes the enablers: political hacks, consultants, law firms, pro-business media, trade associations, lobbyists, think tanks, industry-funded “research” groups, PR firms, and phony “grassroots advocates.” Lest the author be accused of shooting fish in a barrel, she also calls out unscrupulous scientists and both the media and academe for their complicity, conscious or otherwise. For all the intermittent crackdowns on conflicts of interest, Jacquet suggests it’s still business as usual. Meanwhile, she exhorts journalists to be tougher and academics to be more circumspect. The author recognizes a few heroes, too, chiefly whistleblowers and those who refuse to succumb to corporate pressure. Her book is extensively annotated and buttressed by a glossary of terms.
A sharp warning to corporations that deep pockets and armies of accomplices won’t stall a reckoning forever.Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-101-87101-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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