A heady examination of Europe's present and future.
A political philosopher’s tract on the European Union.
Enthusiasts of the great theorists of liberty (Locke, Rawls, etc.) will enjoy Siedentop (Political Science/Oxford Univ.). Launching his argument with Montesquieu and moving through James Madison and De Tocqueville, the author develops a complex but clear picture of the many forces swirling around Europe's bid for unification. He argues that a language of economics has replaced the political idealism that usually attends such movements. As a result, European leaders have created institutions that may be bringing their governments together, but not their peoples. Siedentop performs a rigorous analysis of democracy in Europe today, showing how citizens are treated (and act) more like consumers than active participants in their destinies. He finds that there is a lack of a real discussion about what kinds of rights ordinary Europeans should have in their own union and what sort of government should enforce them. Along the way he delivers insightful critiques of Britain and France, which both seek to shape Europe’s future—arguing that Britain, which lacks a constitution, has no firm basis for participating in union negotiations. Since Margaret Thatcher, he writes, the British government has fallen into the trap of dealing with its problems from a lackluster economic point of view. France, on the other hand, is run by bureaucrats who have done a masterful job of influencing Brussels, the capital of the EU. However, the author believes the French bureaucratic model of government is too undemocratic and ultimately will prove unstable (like the many French republics). He believes a federal system on the model of Germany and the US would be more appropriate, suggesting it might establish laws against discrimination while leaving more mundane issues, like the ingredients of sausages, to member states. Wrapped up in these questions are still more questions, including foreign policy and the role Brussels should play in the EU economy.
A heady examination of Europe's present and future.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-231-12376-0
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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