Full of lessons for American activists on how to bring enhanced social welfare programs into reality, despite the odds.
A tour of progressive countries and their solutions to problems of social issues such as education and health care.
An American resident in Europe, Hakimi Zapata tours the world to analyze the ways in which developed nations have enacted programs leading to progress in meeting social needs. “I became convinced that as we fight for a more equitable and sustainable existence,” she writes, “progressives need to arm themselves with tried-and-tested ideas that provide clear inspiration for our own policies.” In recent memory, she notes by way of example, health care in Britain was a congeries of charity hospitals, rural clinics, and private practices that confined good medical care to those who could afford it, leaving the rest to fend for themselves, very much like America today. Reforms enacted by social activists and strong political leadership led to the national program that, despite the cries of right-wing critics, actually works quite well: As Hakimi Zapata notes, her out-of-pocket payments have been confined to a few vaccinations not covered by national insurance for travel abroad. One such country a couple of generations ago was Singapore, where every citizen has access to housing—and, more, to homeownership, a stake in the game. Norway, once a highly conservative society, leads the world in social programs that include evenly shared, subsidized parenting duties, “a more equal division of family responsibilities in both the short and long term.” Hakimi Zapata does note that bureaucracies attached to these programs can sometimes be cumbersome and difficult to negotiate, but the outcomes are unmistakable: Finland leads the world in education—“our only treasure,” one administrator says. As for the United States? “America is not working for the majority of us,” Hakimi Zapata writes. “Instead it’s working for a tiny superrich minority that amassed its wealth on the back of our collective labor—and our collective impoverishment.”
Full of lessons for American activists on how to bring enhanced social welfare programs into reality, despite the odds.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781620978443
Page Count: 432
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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