A cautionary analysis for future leaders.
A study of how Barack Obama’s handling of the 2008 economic crisis undermined his presidency.
As a member of the transition team for the Clinton and Obama presidencies and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Hundt (In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship, 2006, etc.) was a knowledgeable observer of and participant in Obama’s economic decisions in the months before his inauguration. With no lack of histories, memoirs, and anatomies of the Great Recession, Hundt’s hard-hitting critique is distinguished by the voices of many key players—e.g., Lawrence Summers, Al Gore, Henry Paulson, Robert Reich, Peter Orszag, and David Axelrod—drawn from dozens of interviews. The author’s brisk, tense, and discomfiting history supports his contention that Obama’s policies inevitably culminated in the election of Donald Trump by an angry, disaffected populace. Hundt was an early supporter of Obama and remains a staunch admirer. Obama, he writes, “always stood for inclusion, tolerance, and unity. He worked hard, acted with integrity, stood for high-minded principles.” He was ill-served, however, by the neoliberals and Clinton advisers he chose for his transition team and powerful posts in his administration. They diverted his attention from the dramatic changes in health care, infrastructure, innovations in clean energy, and education reform that he promised during his campaign and convinced him to prop up Wall Street. They advocated bank bailouts to prevent bank runs, budget-balancing, and trust in markets to stanch a worsening economic crisis. Comparing Obama’s economic decisions with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Hundt points to “premature announcements, mistaken assumptions, misplaced fear of deficits, untoward concern for big banks, self-serving assessments, and constraints imposed by non-stimulus considerations” among reasons he deems Obama’s leadership problematic. Hundt’s proposal for infrastructure overhaul involving clean energy generation and new transmission networks was summarily rejected by Summers, Geithner, and Orszag. Obama, however, “could have achieved a robust recovery” by spurring private-sector investment in such proposals. Instead of instituting bold changes, he allowed the rich to get richer, while the economically oppressed voted for Trump.
A cautionary analysis for future leaders.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948122-31-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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