Highly recommended, sobering reading for anyone interested in the economic future, for good and bad.
A gimlet-eyed look at developments in the global economy, in which interesting and sometimes ominous things are happening.
Former Economist editor Davies opens his account in Aceh, Indonesia, where, following the 2004 tsunami, devastation was met with surprising elasticity on the part of local entrepreneurs, such as one who “ignored advice to relocate away from the coast and instead returned quickly to his village to rebuild his life.” Responding immediately to disasters is a hallmark of an agile economy, and, as other economists have noted, disaster can be a strange kind of positive externality, since it provides opportunities to rebuild with newer and better methods and materials. Glasgow conversely suffered because it was slow to rebuild following World War II, like much of Britain, leading other nations to surpass it in such things as shipbuilding and making autos. Davies examines nine places that illustrate economic choices for failure or success, from the disaster economies of a Syrian refugee camp and a Louisiana prison to a modern Japanese town whose population is rapidly aging and the capital of Estonia, a nation at the forefront of modern technology. His case studies represent challenges that include natural disaster, economic inequality, and the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence and their displacement of human workers. Lessons abound, including the remarkable fairness with which Acehnese gold traders repurposed traditional methods of finance and “provided its entrepreneurs with rapid access to cash.” Contrast this with the predatory nature of the Chicago School economics visited on Chile after the military coup of 1973, with Milton Friedman et al. delighting in an experimental setting “untroubled by democracy.” Chile’s economy finally grew, becoming a success story, at a price: Inequality is extreme, and services such as health care are delivered only to those who can afford them. Davies concludes that a decade hence, given the trends he remarks on, most people on Earth will live in “an urban society that is old, technologically advanced and economically unequal.”
Highly recommended, sobering reading for anyone interested in the economic future, for good and bad.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-17048-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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