Although the diction (and thus the going) is sometimes a bit dense, the author successfully illuminates the political ideas...
The political ideas of the ancients still endure—and still propel us into debate and even more vigorous conflict.
Lane (Politics/Princeton Univ.) has written previously about the contemporary relevance of the ancients’ ideas in Eco-Republic: What the Ancients Can Teach Us about Ethics, Virtue, and Sustainable Living (2011). Here, she devotes a chapter to each of the eight ideas: justice, constitution, democracy, virtue, citizenship, cosmopolitanism, republic and sovereignty. In each chapter, she reminds us of the Greek and Roman history we have possibly forgotten since our days of Ancient Civilizations 101, then explores each idea in detail, suggesting how that idea continues to resonate today. (The Why They Matter portion of her subtitle could benefit from a bit more heft and development.) Along the way, Lane reacquaints us—sometimes in great detail—with some of the most notable names in political theory and ancient culture: Herodotus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes, Zeno, Cicero, Tacitus and Seneca are among the most prominent. Continually, we see how three forms of constitution (not the written documents but the more generic meaning of the word) have risen, fallen and combined: kingship, oligarchy and democracy. The author shows how each held sway in various eras (and in various places and combinations) and how the human desire for power and the persuasive enticements of corruption inevitably corrode and eventually destroy. Lane also explores the troubling contradictions at the cores of some democracies: the presence of slaves, the subservience and subjugation of women, the restrictions on the poor and otherwise disadvantaged. Here, the author’s parallels to the contemporary world are most evident and telling. To provide her readers with context, Lane offers a number of useful charts, chronologies and maps.
Although the diction (and thus the going) is sometimes a bit dense, the author successfully illuminates the political ideas that still perplex and divide us.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-691-16647-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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