A great many facts, statistics and historical snippets in search of a credible argument.
An analysis of international crime that purports to demonstrate that it’s the people who run American corporations who are the real criminals.
This might have been an excellent book. Perhaps even an important one. It contains a great deal of information about the ways American government and American businesses have contributed to global criminality. Alas, Woodiwiss, an American history lecturer at the University of the West of England, has another target in his sights, his main argument being that American corporations don’t simply abet criminality—they are themselves criminal organizations. He offers that the American government’s war on organized crime is just a diversion, distracting people from the real criminals, and that the major difference between the laissez-faire, robber-baron capitalism of the late-19th century and today’s capitalism is that America has spread the latter variety around the globe. It’s odd, indeed, that Woodiwiss can have so obviously read so many books about American history, as well as so many government reports and articles in the popular press, without finding a single redeeming feature of present-day free-market capitalism. But the real mystery here is why he finds it necessary to brand the American government’s war on organized crime a conspiracy, and conflate the CEOs of American corporations with Mafia dons. Attempting to redefine bad political judgments and policy errors as cloak-and-dagger malefactions, Woodiwiss is preaching to those already convinced that the triumph of free market capitalism was one of history’s great tragedies.
A great many facts, statistics and historical snippets in search of a credible argument.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1671-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2005
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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