Strong opinions and trenchant insights, dished up by a gifted expert in data visualization.
Combining interviews with dazzling infographics to chronicle five years in the personal and economic lives of 10 Americans from as many income levels.
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for a riveting article that gave visual context to Jeff Bezos’ wealth, Chalabi proves a dab hand both at getting frank admissions from her interviewees about money and using surveys and statistics to put their individual experiences into broader economic contexts. She’s frank about her own situation, too, as she weaves in reports on her own finances (including the ways she divvied up much of the awesome publisher’s advance she got for this project) and records emotionally fraught years struggling to care for her Iraqi parents in the wake of her father’s heart attack and her mother’s stroke. If those latter passages lose the plot and even sometimes drag, her observations elsewhere offer consistently fascinating insights into seemingly diverse topics, from telling correlations between privatized health care and falling life expectancies in the U.S. to the pervasiveness of “money dysmorphia.” In fact, all of her subjects, she writes, admitted to financial insecurity despite occupying household income brackets ranging from virtually nothing to multimillions. The charts and tables she strew freely through her chapters (including one in which she switches to an all graphic format) are likewise engrossing, lit by imaginative designs and graphic elements that ingeniously reflect and enhance the import of the data they record. The author does at last find aid and solace for her personal travails in a large circle of relatives. She closes with references to the pervasive culture of anxiety that capitalism creates. “Capitalism is a profoundly individualizing force that nurtures fear,” she writes. “It teaches us that we cannot support one another or be supported when we need to be. But of course, that’s exactly what we do and what we have to do.”
Strong opinions and trenchant insights, dished up by a gifted expert in data visualization.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593243671
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2026
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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