A weak effort to capitalize on the 2008 campaign debate.
A vitriolic—though intermittently entertaining—political diatribe aimed at Massachusetts.
Keller, a political commentator on Boston’s CBS affiliate, argues that the politics of “the bluest state” are a flawed template for the national Democratic Party. He conflates the Republican electoral victory in 2004 and what he considers to be the failures of the State Democratic leadership, reserving his most vehement criticism for Ted Kennedy, whom he considers the éminence grise. Keller relies heavily on interviews and anecdotes to make the case that Massachusetts Democrats have led their state into economic disaster because of their callous disregard for the bulk of the electorate: blue-collar workers. He accuses Kennedy Democrats of mouthing liberal rhetoric but ignoring the effects of high taxes, escalating real-estate values and loss of jobs on the average working man, and he faults former Massachusetts Republican Governor Mitt Romney for signing the Democratic-sponsored universal health-coverage bill. Readers unfamiliar with the Massachusetts political terrain will have to take much of the author’s argument on good faith, since the book is light on balanced reportage and heavy on political polemic. The author displays a knack for delivering witty one-liners, but it often leads him into questionable territory—especially his combined swipe at Massachusetts’s first black governor, Deval Patrick, and Barack Obama: “While the nation contemplates taking a chance on Barack Obama, an erudite black Harvard Law grad, we’ve already taken the plunge with our own mini-Obama.” While Keller’s major attack is against his fellow Democrats, he also targets “boomer liberalism” and calls the uproar surrounding former Harvard President Larry Summers’ remarks about women scientists a “liberal jihad.” The author claims that he is a liberal Democrat, but his jabs at the Massachusetts power elite rely heavily on conservative, Republican rhetoric.
A weak effort to capitalize on the 2008 campaign debate.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36831-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
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