A common-sense argument that greater political unity is within reach, and would improve the nation’s prospects.
A panoramic survey of America’s political problems that offers a bipartisan path to their solution.
Busman’s inaugural effort is long on ambition. In it, he tackles an impressive array of seemingly intractable issues that have plagued United States politics, including tumult in the Middle East, nuclear energy, tax reform, same-sex marriage and the Electoral College. What connects these disparate topics, he says, is that they’ve all been created or exacerbated by blinkered partisan warfare. He aims to offer policy suggestions, light on ideology, that might have appeal across the political divide. He calls these policy proposals “planks,” and considers them “placeholders” designed to stimulate discussion and promote clarity rather than decisive conclusions. Although many of his proposals will be familiar to readers who faithfully follow the news, some, such as the elimination of depreciation from the corporate tax code, are unconventional and provocative. Busman’s ultimate objective is to create a full platform for a new political party, the “American Unity Party,” made up of people who are moderately conservative on fiscal issues and moderately progressive on social ones. The plan hinges on the idea that the country’s electoral divisions are largely illusory: “Our underlying thesis is that the United States is not as polarized as our elections and the polls tell us we are.” Readers may find some of his suggestions quixotic, such as the notion that aggressively promoting women’s rights in predominantly Muslim countries will win greater respect for the United States. Also, such a vast survey of so many subjects necessarily means that the analysis sometimes lacks depth; for example, his plan to introduce a “consolidated national health plan that will cover all Americans and foreign residents working legally in the U.S.” is both confusing and overly broad. Nonetheless, this is a refreshingly sincere attempt to build bridges between people who may share more common ground than they think.
A common-sense argument that greater political unity is within reach, and would improve the nation’s prospects.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491024119
Page Count: 296
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
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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