Exemplary political writing by a renowned maverick.
Uncollected essays by one of America’s preeminent political philosophers.
If anyone deserves the mantle “America’s Orwell,” it’s Rorty (1931-2007), who combined political activism and sharp observation with a fierce intellectual independence that allowed him to criticize both left-wing and right-wing ambitions. He also had a dependably Orwellian lack of faith that his fellow humans would rise up to defend democratic institutions if it involved sacrificing self-interest. Indeed, as Rorty writes about one notorious apologist for authoritarianism, “People like [Rush] Limbaugh will persuade more and more white males who cannot find a foothold in the middle class that the improvements in the situation of college-educated women, blacks, and gays have been made at their expense.” That proved to be just so, and those resentments, which he considers elsewhere, enabled the rise of the person whom he saw in outline if not in name, the would-be fascist strongman who would undo America’s institutions—which, Rorty wrote in 2004, “have become pretty fragile”—and attempt to install himself as president for life regardless of election outcomes. The author didn’t hold out much hope for democracy when he was alive, and surely he wouldn’t now. He ponders how future historians will interpret an American democracy that lasted barely 200 years, “like the age of the Antonines,” replaced by a “corrupt plutocracy.” Of particular relevance are Rorty’s repeated observations on the effects of economic inequality, in the U.S. and worldwide, which he predicted would lead to resource wars and political instability. He also lands a strong point by noting that because Republicans are reluctant to discuss wealth inequality, they favor igniting skirmishes in a long-fought culture war. Disconcertingly, he adds, “What is more surprising is that the left should let itself be so distracted from its longtime concern with economic redistribution,” suckered into battling those wars instead of keeping its eye on the prize.
Exemplary political writing by a renowned maverick.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-691-21752-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
PERSPECTIVES
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