It’s not too difficult to make the more preposterous spoutings of the way-out right look ridiculous, but Conason has fun...
New York Observer and Salon.com columnist Conason (co-author, The Hunting of the President, 2000) flushes the hypocrisy out of conservative rants and jibes at liberals.
Would Americans ever take the bluster of the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters seriously? No way: citizens of the Republic “believe in fairness, equality, opportunity and compassion; they reject social Darwinism and excessive privilege,” writes Conason, who would like to bury once and for all “the buzz of conservative cant [that] creates an illusion of consensus.” Here he takes on the most egregious examples of conservative demagoguery, playing their cards right back at them. Are conservatives more morally rectitudinous than their liberal colleagues? Ask Newt Gingrich, Helen Chenoweth, and the laughably hypocritical Coulter, who once remarked, “Let’s say I go out every night, I meet a guy and have sex with him. Good for me. I’m not married.” Are conservatives great patriots and defenders of the land, while liberals and Democrats cower like curs and dodge the draft? Ask Daniel Inouye, John Kerry, and Max Cleland, and then ask George W. Bush, John Ashcroft, Tom DeLay, and Saxby Chambliss. Who defends the common man? Bush wraps his arms around the nine rescued Quecreek miners while he proposes to slash the Mine Safety and Health Administration budget. Who champions the free market? Not conservatives, avers Conason, with their taste for crony capitalism and “the ethos of privilege, power and entitlement.” The author’s points are all well taken, though he regrettably apes without parody the kind of statistic-slinging that conservatives employ. A few real flinchers (“What conservatives really hate most is a fair fight, which brings out their inner wimp”) don’t mar his best point: conservatism’s “steep descent from the standard of literacy and wit once set by William F. Buckley Jr.” to the impoverished, squalid bleats of Dinesh D’Souza, Laura Ingraham, and Michael Savage.
It’s not too difficult to make the more preposterous spoutings of the way-out right look ridiculous, but Conason has fun hitting his easy targets.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31560-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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