Occasionally overwrought but right on the money in enumerating Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors.
Thirty pieces of silver or a few billion rubles: By counterterrorism expert Nance’s account, either adds up to treason.
In his predecessor volume The Plot To Destroy Democracy: How Putin’s Spies Are Winning Control of America and Dismantling the West (2018), the author gave Donald Trump some benefit of the doubt with the thought that perhaps he’d unwittingly fallen into schemes on the part of Russian intelligence, being “too stupid to suss it out.” Here, in an account that begins with Trump’s plea during the 2016 campaign for Russia, “if you’re listening…to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Nance holds that Trump’s open act of soliciting the aid of a foreign and rival government was an act of treason—and a knowing one as well. The pairing was natural, by the author’s account, since Russia harbored the same hatred for nonheterosexuals and nonwhites that the Republican Party so openly manifests. Nance’s argument is scattershot and heated, but he does a good job of showing how the Russian campaign to infiltrate the Trump campaign was staged and was so willingly accepted, with key agents taking roles in the Miss Universe contest, swaying the National Rifle Association, and conning Donald Trump Jr., “an avid shooter of defenseless animals.” Moreover, he shows that Trump had opened the door for all of this collusion decades earlier, when he signaled that only he could make the decisions necessary to fix the world’s problems, taking out a full-page New York Times ad in 1987 to condemn NATO and demand that the U.S. “stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves,” exactly in keeping with the Russian line. Trump emerges as treasonous, to be sure, as do others in his administration, notably Attorney General William Barr—and the book is timely, inasmuch as they’re now busily explaining new charges of collusion with Ukraine and other nations in the 2020 campaign.
Occasionally overwrought but right on the money in enumerating Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-31-653576-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2019
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
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
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