A rigorously argued manifesto against corporate capitalism, even with its supposedly friendly face.
A gimlet-eyed critique of the notion of the “socially responsible” corporation.
In April 2019, recounts University of British Columbia law professor Bakan, JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon led a drive with 200-odd other CEOs to declare that corporations were committed not to maximizing returns for their shareholders, but also to serving “workers, communities, and the environment.” It was an unexpected repudiation of the dog-eat-dog capitalist ethic. As the author argues, it is also misplaced; even with this declaration, born of Davos conferences and economic think tanks, the corporation really hasn’t changed, “at least not fundamentally.” Bakan views the “psychopathic institution” with jaundiced disdain, and clearly he does not trust the Dimon declaration. Instead, he expects, the corporation will simply take the occasion of being seen for once as good guys to “cajole governments to free them from the regulations designed to protect public interests and citizens’ well-being,” pushing for further deregulation and privatization. “Visit the website of any major corporation and you’ll wonder whether you’ve accidentally clicked on that of an NGO or activist group,” writes the author—but then read between the lines. Quoting Joseph Stiglitz, Bakan predicts that the drive to deregulate and allow corporations to self-regulate is a recipe for further financial crises, and the supposed transformation of the corporation into a “caring, publicly minded” entity is a false front that disguises the voracious wish of the corporation to take control of every aspect of the economy. This includes the public sector and such services as delivering drinking water to municipalities, which leads to disasters like Flint. Writing clearly and with minimal pleading to economic authority, the author closes by invoking the lessons of the pandemic, which tells us that corporate values are not those of ordinary people: “Unbridled self-interest, individualism, competition, and commoditization cannot be the values that guide us.”
A rigorously argued manifesto against corporate capitalism, even with its supposedly friendly face.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-9972-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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