A fairly straightforward conservative argument that partisan politics and lack of reverence for capitalism portend the...
A conservative political commentator sees democracy and capitalism in peril.
Goldberg (The Tyranny of Cliché: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, 2012, etc.), a National Review senior editor and member of the Fox News All-Stars, continues the passionate, polemical celebration of conservative values—and disdain for the liberal left—that informed his previous two books. The health and future of our nation, he argues, are being undermined by tribalism (read: identity politics) and a wrongheaded conviction that the state can be “the only source of meaning in our lives.” As a conservative, he disparages both the tea party, which he once heartily supported, and Donald Trump. The tea party “married populism to the principles of the Founding, demanding the government live within its means and abide by the Constitution,” but it fell into tribalism after being unfairly branded by the media as “racist yokels and boobs.” Trump, “boorish and crude,” lacks character, much less consistent beliefs in any ideology. True conservatism, Goldberg asserts, “is a bundle of ideological commitments: limited government, natural rights, the importance of traditional values, patriotism, gratitude” and “the beliefs that ideas matter and that character matters.” Gratitude ranks high in that list, and the author insists that Americans should be thankful for what he—drawing on scholars such as Ernest Gellner—calls the “Miracle,” modern capitalism. Emerging in 18th-century England, the Miracle “is an attitude, expressed in new ideas and the rhetoric that accompanies them.” Among those new ideas was an “ideology of merit, industriousness, innovation, contracts, and rights.” Before the Miracle, “notions of betterment, innovation, and improvement were seen, literally, as heresy.” But the Miracle rewards “earned success,” which, the author asserts, “is the secret to meaningful happiness.” As for economic inequality, the author claims that the free-market system is “the only anti-poverty system ever invented.” A supporter of immigration, Goldberg also supports assimilation; civil society works best “in ethnically or culturally homogeneous communities.”
A fairly straightforward conservative argument that partisan politics and lack of reverence for capitalism portend the demise of democracy.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-90493-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Crown Forum
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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