A strident critique of the left.
A debut political book identifies the dangerous spread of progressive policies in the United States.
Leftist policies are ascendant in the Democratic Party. Liberals are promising voters free medical care, education, food, and housing while arguing that compassion demands that the United States allow millions of illegal immigrants to enter the country. In reality, Merlo asserts, the Democrats are just trying to import new voters to help them turn America into a socialist country—or, worse, a member state in some sort of socialist world government. The author explains the origins of the American left and how it has merged with the Democratic Party, playing upon the resentments of persecuted groups—women, racial minorities, LGBTQ, and the poor—to encourage violence, reopen wounds, and subvert the capitalist order. He then shows the adverse effects of the left’s social policies, some of which are based on questionable findings. He blames the current political state on the nation’s pernicious anti-intellectualism: “Unfortunately, America seems to have rejected aristocracy at the same time it renounced monarchy, and replaced it with antiintellectualism….Intellectually-gifted students are often mocked, and the pretty girls prefer Mr. Touchdown.” Interestingly, Merlo makes a number of arguments that would seem to paint him as an anti-intellectual, or at least someone ill-informed. He claims that Muslims should not be allowed to immigrate in large numbers to the United States because some Muslim men will be driven to assault and rape by the sight of scantily clad American women. He also contends that some of these same women are accusing flirtatious men of impropriety, costing them their careers. Merlo’s prose attempts to present itself as objective but it is filled with odd and sometimes controversial asides: “The resurgence of TB among homosexuals and drug-users (homosexuals are especially likely to use drugs while having sex) was predictable, but, ignored in the name of sympathy for Haitians.” The ambitious book is well-researched and the author includes numerous quotes from other sources. But he sometimes inserts them into the text without full explanations (“I think the alt-left folks are working toward now…chaos, anarchy, and regime overthrow…and we should be alert to their intentions”), referring the audience to a Bibliography. The work ends up reading more like a blog post rant than a polished work of nonfiction.
A strident critique of the left.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4897-1994-2
Page Count: 92
Publisher: LifeRichPublishing
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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