Short, sometimes acerbic commentaries on the virtues of markets and the sins of overweening government.
Metastasizing financial and business regulation threatens economic freedom—including the all-important freedom to go broke—according to this collection of pithy libertarian essays.
Mazorra, an investment consultant, author (Make Lemonade: A Bright View on Investing, on Financial Markets and on the Economy, 2007) and blogger styles these 31 essays, each a few pages long, as a “daily devotional” for those whose faith in the free market needs bolstering in a time of massive government intervention. With brevity in mind, he distills his ideas into vivid impressions and punchy parables: He likens the Obama Administration’s economic stimulus programs to a doctor who gives a bleeding patient one blood transfusion after another but never stitches up the wound; meanwhile, political leaders who vow to cut deficits over the coming decades “sound like the proverbial gambler begging the mob, on behalf of his kneecaps, for just a little more time.” Mazorra backs up his colorful imagery with incisive, accessible analyses of economic principles. The bankruptcies averted by the auto industry bailout, he argues, would not have been a catastrophe for the American economy since much of the business lost in the shuttering of Chrysler or GM would have been picked up by Japanese car companies’ factories and dealerships in the United States. Similarly, he contends, unemployment caused by disruptive technologies or free trade is more than compensated by lower prices to consumers and new jobs in growing industries and export companies. Throughout, he emphasizes that “pain is essential.” By forcing companies and individuals to bear the consequences of their bad choices, the free market disciplines them far more effectively than the effects of government regulation and bailouts can. Mazorra’s doctrines definitely tilt right, but he’s evenhanded in his criticisms of Democrats and Republicans in their common subservience to special interests and preference for expedient politics over sound policy. Although his arguments can seem simplistic at times, he offers common sense and meticulous reasoning wrapped in lucid, down-to-earth prose that illuminates economic conundrums.
Short, sometimes acerbic commentaries on the virtues of markets and the sins of overweening government.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475970449
Page Count: 98
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2013
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
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
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