A smart, comprehensive economics guide with a feminist twist.
Diamond (Whole Worlds Could Pass Away, 2017, etc.) sets out to debunk the patriarchy of capitalism in this nonfiction work aimed at women.
Capitalism, throughout history, has kept women from pursuing an equal or gainful role in the creation and accumulation of wealth, according to the author. Even today, she says, societal norms discourage women from taking an interest in economic affairs. As she writes in her introduction, when it comes to the economic discussions, “letting yourself doze off is as dangerous as sleeping with a huge python in the house. Only when a greater number of women understand economic secrets, muffled by slithery language, will we find the political will to transform them.” To that end, she offers a crash course in basic economic theory along with investigative dives into how women and minorities have been shut out of economic growth, the cause and fallout of the 2008 global recession, and the ways in which the economy could be fixed to work better for everyone. Mixing personal narrative, history, definitions, and entertaining comic-strip asides, illustrated by Todd, Diamond encourages women to get informed, to get angry, and to talk about wresting control of society from the oppressive “EconoMan.” Diamond writes in a peppy, accessible prose that brings clarity to complex subjects: “Voilà! It’s free market magic. The bias of sexism and racism is easily eliminated,” she says while explaining economist Milton Friedman’s theory of the cost of prejudice. “You see how this works for us, girls?” But for all these flourishes, the author doesn’t shy away from tackling complex (and sometimes-dry) economic ideas. Diamond claims to be merely an amateur economist, but her experience as a novelist, journalist, and professor are all brought to bear to demystify difficult concepts, such as Pareto efficiency (“Pareto basically said that an allocation of resources is efficient if as a result, one individual is better off, and no individual is worse off”). Diamond’s wit and charm, combined with Todd’s quirky art, succeed in creating an economic primer that’s both informative and fun.
A smart, comprehensive economics guide with a feminist twist.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-318-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
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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