A trenchant critique of the Left’s economic radicalism, coupling shrewd analysis with a stinging polemic.
The hypertrophy of the federal government has brought socialism out of hibernation and turned it into a dire threat to the American economy, according to this sweeping historical study.
Distinguishing his subject from the “traditional Left” of liberals, labor unions, and other moderate leftists, Young warns of a resurgent socialist Left with Marxist roots, among whom he numbers Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other congressional Squad members, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the campus protest Left. The author focuses on their economic agenda, which, he argues, envisions the federal government taking over and nationalizing most of the economy, providing free education and health care, guaranteeing housing and jobs, and imposing confiscatory wealth taxes. The result, he contends, would be a sluggish, inefficient, moribund economy crushed by a terminally bloated government sector. Starting in the Obama administration, Young argues, this socialist Left reemerged to try to commandeer the federal government juggernaut by taking over the Democratic Party. The author presents an intricate and wide-ranging analysis of American economics and politics, one that has both interpretive breadth and a wealth of statistical detail. He’s especially good on the socio-economic miracle of colonial America, with its unprecedented levels of prosperity and equality based in self-government, and on the New Deal’s radical break with the American pattern of limited government. At times, he overstates the gap between the Sanders-AOC program and Democratic Party traditions, but he makes a vigorous case that their approach is economically and politically unsustainable because of its heavy tax and regulatory burdens. Young conveys all of this in lucid prose that packs an aphoristic punch. (“As a multiplicity of movements with at least as many voices and priorities, the socialist Left is political schizophrenia.”) Leftists and honest-to-God socialists will find much to dispute here, but Young offers a compelling conservative riposte to progressive orthodoxies.
A trenchant critique of the Left’s economic radicalism, coupling shrewd analysis with a stinging polemic.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2024
ISBN: 9798891381292
Page Count: 432
Publisher: RealClear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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