An often well-reasoned, if sometimes speculative, challenge to American political orthodoxy.
A rumination on contemporary American politics.
“The common ground” in American political discourse, writes McKinney, has been replaced by “two warring ideological camps refusing to consider any possible merit in their opponent’s arguments.” In an effort to bridge this divide, he provides readers seven essays with what he characterizes as pragmatic solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing issues. Many offer alternative perspectives than those proposed by both major parties; on gun control, for instance, the book recognizes a need for rural Americans to have access to guns for self-protection, given their isolation from law enforcement, but also sees value in regulating weapons that have the “capacity for mass casualties.” His health care chapter, rather than focusing on costs or insurance, suggests that solutions should be directed toward corporations that inundate the food supply chain with “adulterated,” unhealthy, and addictive foods. Other essays focus on such topics as education, employment, and aspects of foreign policy, and a postscript provides an analysis of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. McKinney seems most passionate about environmentalism, which appears in multiple chapters, and he tackles the beliefs of climate change–deniers head-on; one particularly engaging idea is a kinetic energy project that converts the compression of airport foot traffic into usable energy. So central is the environmental crisis to McKinney’s vision of future political issues that he goes so far as to predict a resurgence of the Green Party as a viable third party. For the most part, though, this deliberately nonpartisan book straightforwardly lays out the Republican and Democratic stances on various issues with minimal criticism, which may be refreshing to some readers but will frustrate others as both-sides-ism. Nuanced disagreements within political parties are also largely ignored in this framework, be they conflicts between neoliberals and the left within the Democratic Party, or between the alt-right and fiscal conservatives among Republicans. There’s also a lack of citations and hard data to back up the author’s claims, which would have been made stronger with quantitative evidence.
An often well-reasoned, if sometimes speculative, challenge to American political orthodoxy.Pub Date: April 21, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-74-223087-8
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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