An extensively documented and compelling call for reform, and a direct challenge to the conventional free-market wisdom.
Katz (In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, not reviewed) offers a bleak vision of the state of America’s economic health by examining the erosion of welfare benefits in the Information Age.
Through a detailed depiction of the evolution of public and private approaches to relief systems (from colonial days to the present), the text offers an explanation for a profound shift in the American consciousness. Well-researched and thorough, Katz’s account provides a scathing rebuttal of many conventionally held beliefs regarding welfare in the US today. Attacking the problem from every conceivable angle, he discusses ways in which the changing face of urban economics has affected the poor and how these changes reinforce poverty and desperation. He also examines the ways in which the arbitrary separation of welfare benefits into “entitlements” for the poorest of the poor (AFDC, etc.) and “insurance” for the middle class (unemployment compensation, social security, workers compensation, etc.) has undermined popular support for aid for those who need it most. The author goes on to discuss how even recipients of those benefits targeted most obviously to placate the middle class are being stigmatized in the current climate of welfare reform. From probing changes in health care delivery and its impact on the well-being of the nation’s poor to exposing the development of the term “undeserving poor” and the genesis of its current definition, Katz reveals himself to be that rarest of creatures: an academic with a public conscience and agenda.
An extensively documented and compelling call for reform, and a direct challenge to the conventional free-market wisdom.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-5208-9
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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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