Essential backstory on the news from Iraq.
A timely and nuanced account of a simple word that has emerged triumphantly from history, crying, “Power to the people!”
Dunn (Political Theory/King’s College, Cambridge) comes at democracy from all angles, exploring its changing meaning and impact from its introduction in Athens by the nobleman Kleisthenes in 507 b.c. to its growing dominance in the Western world since 1945. The word itself comes from the Greek noun demokratia: power in the hands of the demos—the people as a whole. Democracy flourished briefly in Greece, where it became a basis for community of the rich and poor, then virtually disappeared for 2,000 years until its reemergence in the American and French revolutions of the 18th century. Drawing on writers from Thucydides to Tocqueville, the author examines democracy as a concept, as a form of government and as a political value, showing how our understanding of its meaning has changed with political expectations. Dunn’s explications are often a bit intricate, but readers will want to stay with him to find out how we got where we are today. No matter the precise form of government (presidential, parliamentary, etc.), democracies are always characterized by ever-widening representation and the shared belief that it must be the people who decide what is to be done. After gaining new saliency worldwide during the Cold War, democracy has become a political weapon in the post-9/11 era, with George W. Bush declaring in 2002, “The global expansion of democracy is the ultimate force in rolling back terrorism and tyranny.” The author questions whether democracy is the appropriate vehicle. Why, he asks, would giving bitter people more control over their rulers keep them from acting in support of terrorism? Expectations for globalization aside, Dunn says democracy now stands as the “political core of the civilization which the West offers to the rest of the world.”
Essential backstory on the news from Iraq.Pub Date: July 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-87113-931-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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