Like-minded readers will find this book inspiring and invaluable. Others may find it overly strident at worst or a political...
The founders of Tea Party Patriots, Inc., explain their movement and its plan “to restore America to greatness.”
Meckler, a lawyer, entrepreneur and family man from California, and Martin, a housecleaner and family woman from Atlanta who lost her home in the collapse of the housing bubble, found each other after the emotional response of CNBC financial analyst Rick Santelli on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to the Obama administration’s 2009 proposal to bail out delinquent mortgages. Claiming the Founding Fathers would be rolling over in their graves, Santelli called for a Chicago Tea Party in July. Rush Limbaugh broadcast Santelli’s rant on his radio show and called for revolution. “The next day,” the authors note, “the modern-day Tea Party movement was born.” Meckler and Martin deny that theirs is an “Astroturf” (i.e., artificial) grass roots movement and a front for the Republican Party. They claim their numbers were, from the beginning, made up of Republicans, Democrats and Independents, like Meckler himself, who had all but given up on the two-party system. But the politics they advocate are solidly right wing. Peppering the text with quotes from founders like Jefferson and Madison and conservative icons like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, they argue for small government, low taxes and a free market. They want to abolish the income tax, overturn the Health Care Reform Act of 2010, weaken public-employee unions, challenge public education with vouchers for educational choice and somehow instill in their fellow citizens and the nation’s culture makers reverence for American exceptionalism. Areas of common ground with those they disagree with, such as an intriguing proposal for more direct democracy via the Internet, are rare.
Like-minded readers will find this book inspiring and invaluable. Others may find it overly strident at worst or a political curiosity at best.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9437-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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