A searching work of history that speaks ably to how we got where we are today, the 1 percent and the rest.
Economic inequality may seem a new thing, but in America, thus it has ever been.
Today the U.S. is “the most economically unequal of all developed nations.” That results from a long tradition that, as Columbia history scholar Phillips-Fein chronicles, repudiates the Jeffersonian ideal of equality—not that Jefferson was ever fully on board with it himself. Instead, it replaces equality with the elite view that working people are “essentially inferior to the rich” through inborn, biological, hereditary failure, while the poor are poor because they are being punished for something or another and the rich are conversely being rewarded and are thus “qualified for superior stations,” as John Adams, the Founding Father, remarked. Add machines to the mix come the Industrial Revolution, and there arose wealthy factory owners and moguls such as Andrew Carnegie, who admittedly had misgivings about his vast fortune. In Carnegie’s time, political theorists, such as Yale professor William Graham Sumner, took the machine to its limits, advancing ideas that would blossom into the technocratic movement of the early 20th century, whose proponents argued that scientists and engineers should rule the world—and forget about democracy. “These were not fringe thinkers,” writes Phillips-Fein. “For most of the teens and 1920s, they were thoroughly in the mainstream of American political and intellectual life.” Their ideas have been reborn several times, courtesy of Ayn Rand and, today, the likes of Curtis Yarvin, who asserts that the presidency should be scrapped for an “all-powerful CEO.” The author’s history reaches back a bit further than Jill Lepore’s contemporaneous Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, but each book complements the other in depicting a worldview that sees most humans as either surplus or interchangeable parts in a machine.
A searching work of history that speaks ably to how we got where we are today, the 1 percent and the rest.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9781324074441
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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
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
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