The book leans decidedly to the right, but Fund and von Spakovsky raise issues of partisan intrigue, dishonesty and...
Fund and von Spakovsky (Who's Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk, 2012) team up again for a no-holds-barred assault on Attorney General Eric Holder.
Both authors are well-known shapers of conservative opinion, and von Spakovsky, of George W. Bush’s Justice Department, so the authors include certain ongoing issues promoted by the right. These include, among others, the 2009-2011 “Operation Fast and Furious” gunwalking scandal, during which the Justice Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were investigated for distributing weapons in Mexico subsequently used with deadly effect against American border enforcement agents. As a result, Holder became the first attorney general in history to be held in contempt of Congress, but Democrats voted overwhelmingly in support of Holder. What Fund and von Spakovsky have put together in this account seems to merit thoughtful consideration rather than peremptory dismissal as yet another partisan assault. For example, they ask why Holder's accounts of when he learned about the gunwalking scandal differed significantly in the versions he presented before the House and the Senate—and the differences have not been reconciled. The authors point to numerous Supreme Court decisions that question the legality and honesty of actions undertaken by Holder's department, and they discuss a number of criminal and civil prosecutions that have been dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct, including lying and withholding exculpatory evidence. Fund and von Spakovsky also question his practice of unilaterally changing interpretations of laws—e.g., the 1961 Interstate Wire Act. The authors detail the chilling effects of censorship and raise some intriguing issues about the conduct of the Justice Department’s civil rights division.
The book leans decidedly to the right, but Fund and von Spakovsky raise issues of partisan intrigue, dishonesty and criminality, with sufficient evidence to merit serious investigation and not just partisan dismissal.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232092-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Broadside Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
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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