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
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
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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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