A thoughtful, if overextended, critique of big government.
A debut book presents a diagnosis of the U.S.’s current political ailments, coupled with a litany of suggested reforms.
Stockdell begins his study with a grim appraisal of America’s current state of health; it’s not merely that the economy is in tatters, but that the political class is no longer generally trusted to trigger a turnaround. The principal problem seems to be monstrously bloated government, practically ineffective, fiscally prodigal, and highly vulnerable to corruption. The author analyzes the inherent failings of a centralized bureaucracy while reflecting on his own experiences as a civil servant. Stockdell particularly objects to government’s heavy-handed attempts to either coerce behavior or provide the kinds of services best offered by the private sector. He discusses the psychological motivations behind big government ideology, which largely embrace the impatient impulse to technocratically solve every problem quickly, or the self-aggrandizement of government officials. The author also furnishes a broad historical context, detailing the way leftist politics in the U.S. has borrowed from the failed legacy of European political theory: “In recent years, the progressive ideology has morphed into a form of socialism, which believes in the absolute dominance of the government and radical redistribution of wealth.” Ultimately, the nation’s problems are so systemically deep, he recommends a Constitutional Convention that, among other things, makes it easier for the public to directly initiate Constitutional reform. He suggests some amendments, too: for example, term limits for members of Congress and federal judges and limits on campaign spending. This is a wide-ranging analysis that covers everything from gun control to the Electoral College. The author certainly has his political commitments (the book is inspired by Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which advocates individualism), but each section is written with impressive bipartisan moderation. Stockdell often anticipates rational objections to his policy preferences and furnishes reasonable responses to them. The book covers far too much ground, and so the work turns out to be pithy rather than deep, something one might anticipate from the immodest title. It can also be delightfully quirky: there’s an extended aside on postmodern thought. There isn’t much new here philosophically, but the author contributes some concrete policy proposals worthy of consideration.
A thoughtful, if overextended, critique of big government.Pub Date: June 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5245-0817-3
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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