by Philip K. Howard ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2014
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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