Learsy (Over a Barrel, 2007) offers a chronological and critical perspective on the power wielded by Big Oil and Wall Street.
According to this compilation of Learsy’s writings for the Huffington Post over a five-year period, the nation’s economic health is essentially controlled by the petroleum and financial industries. Learsy’s searing criticism of these companies goes so far as to suggest that they, in collusion with the federal government, essentially created the country’s recent financial meltdown. The book is well-organized into logical sections, “Enemies Foreign” (in particular, OPEC), “Enemies Domestic” (including Big Oil and Wall Street) and “How We Can Fight Back,” which addresses the strategic petroleum reserve, our appetite for oil consumption and alternate energy sources. These essays may strike some as largely left-leaning, but one cannot argue with the author’s ability to identify and document the free reign given to oil companies and the transgressions of financial firms. His analysis of Big Oil’s influence during the George W. Bush years is particularly insightful. Learsy is refreshingly blunt. His indignation is palpable, as in this statement from a 2010 piece: “Where is the outrage here? Where are our vigilant Congress, our administration, our somnolent justice department and Federal Trade Commission while the oil boys are taking us to the cleaners?” In a 2009 essay about the Wall Street implosion, Learsy writes that the United States’ “creative vision and sense of fair play are being destroyed by vested interests that have stacked the deck so consistently and successfully as to destroy the meritocracy’s credibility altogether.” Learsy skewers Big Oil, Wall Street and the government alike, though he concedes there are no easy solutions to what has become an endemic problem. In his afterword, he says, “Too many people and interests have too much at stake in the status quo—both financially and in terms of their power of influence.” While Learsy’s commentary is unrelentingly harsh, it does represent an eloquent call to arms. On-target insights that will illuminate and enrage the average citizen.
Pub Date: May 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462018109
Page Count: 318
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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