Williamson (Roughnecking It, 1982, etc.) examines the intertwined economic and moral issues presented by the immigration debate. The author, formerly an editor of National Review, challenges what he calls the ``myth'' that immigration was always a blessing for America. He concedes that the vast numbers of immigrants from Britain, Germany, and Ireland who came here in the 19th century, despite sometimes strong opposition, were needed to settle the land. These immigrants gradually absorbed American culture and were in turn absorbed into American society. Williamson sees the massive immigration from 1870 to the 1920s as the start of great and disruptive changes, citing gradual but persistent negative effects on national identity, social and political order, population growth, and the environment. While earlier immigrants may have had a disruptive effect on America, Williamson sees the massive numbers of modern immigrants, both legal and illegal, from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and eastern Europe, and their embrace of the concept of multiculturalism, as challenging the very idea of a special American identity. He argues that the newcomers have produced levels of cultural, ethnic, and social diversity that have had the effect of loosening the old American commitment to a distinctive, homogenous identity. Rather than being transformed by American culture, the author argues, these immigrants have tried to remake it, pressing for a larger and ever-more intrusive government, thus undermining traditional American concepts of personal liberty and self-reliance, and arguing against any cohesive national culture. Williamson points to such developments as the tensions between Cuban immigrants and poorer African- Americans in Miami as demonstrating that immigration is also generating new, and potentiallly violent, economic conflicts in American society. The book, largely polemical, would have benefitted from further examples and from a discussion of remedies. Nonetheless, Williamson does raise some disturbing questions about the will of America to enforce its laws, to control its borders, and to define and protect its identity.
Pub Date: July 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-03286-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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