An enlightening—and dismal—view of the Golden State's economic decline from a former editor of the Sacramento Bee. Schrag takes the point of view that the principal cause of California's waning from a major industrial state to its present fiscal nightmare is the voter-initiated proposition system. And the culprit of all propositions, according to him, is Proposition 13, passed in 1978 to drastically limit property taxes and reassessments, thereby diluting the quality of California's once exemplary public-school system (which drew the majority of its funding from property taxes). The issue is complicated. Schrag acknowledges that the proponents of Proposition 13 were unfairly assessed by the preexisting property tax system—that people who were living on the same streets and in comparable houses were absorbing tax discrepancies in the thousands of dollars. And he observes that to fund schools via property taxes is inherently dubious; the practice fails to provide equal funding to all districts, and thereby may violate the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The continuing problem, Schrag notes, is that Californias rising minority population, desperately needing the public funding that Proposition 13 has eliminated, is still largely governed by a conservative white electorate much like that of Orange County (from which Proposition 13 sprung). Finally, the author addresses the inherent fault of a plebiscite system: Direct democracy, so-called, leads to tyranny by the majority and thus excludes the Jeffersonian principles of individual rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Schrag deals out political blame equally, finding as much fault with Gov. Jerry Browns inaction over these issues as with Ronald Reagan for embracing the supply-side, anti-tax stance—in the Spirit of 13''—and moving it to the national level. Praise is due to Schrag for taking a complex subject and making it accessible.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56584-357-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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
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
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