Some may find the diagnosis persuasive, but the cures proposed may worsen long-standing inequities.
A blast against dysfunctional government, which Howard (Life Without Lawyers: Restoring Accountability in America, 2010, etc.) calls “a form of tyranny.”
In the author's view, when push comes to shove and problems need to be solved through action, and not another feasibility study, nobody has the authority to act. He evinces particular fury in considering long-standing legal obligations that bind the hands of government at all levels. Howard examines many of the usual suspects: “In 2010,” he writes, “70 percent of federal tax revenue was consumed by three entitlement programs (Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) that don’t even come up for annual congressional authorization.” Another group consuming funds is public sector employees—police, firefighters and teachers, among others—whose contracts and work rules hamstring state and local governments. Howard ridicules bureaucratic idiocies typified by the shenanigans regarding New Jersey's Bayonne Bridge, which needs upgrading or replacement to prepare for supersized Panamax ships. After more than a decade and nearly 50 approvals obtained from 20 different government entities, the project is still in limbo. Where other countries—e.g., the Netherlands—have “one stop shopping” for approvals, the United States now ranks 16th worldwide in ease of access for construction permits. Howard adds environmental and other kinds of laws to his list of contributors to dysfunctional government, and he dismisses most politicians as complicit. The author claims that the rule of law has become a kind of “automatic government” undermining predictability while “leaving citizens open to arbitrary state power.” As for solutions, Howard calls for a Napoleonic type of codification of law at all levels, a system of special commissions to smooth out infrastructure approvals, the addressing of overlapping government functions and mandatory elimination of certain old laws.
Some may find the diagnosis persuasive, but the cures proposed may worsen long-standing inequities.Pub Date: April 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-08282-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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