A welcome plan from a wealthy man with empathy for the less fortunate.
The founder and general counsel of the nonprofit organization Prosperity Now explains how providing a few thousand dollars to every American family without a current financial cushion could move the entire nation toward economic health.
Friedman, who comes from the Levi Strauss family, focuses on how the outlays to each family could improve housing equality, education opportunities, and small-business entrepreneurship while also constructing a safety net that could rescue the nonwealthy from ruination due to unexpected health care costs or loss of employment. He also distinguishes his proposals from the oft-mentioned universal basic income, which is receiving considerable attention across the political spectrum. Though Friedman presents his prescriptions clearly, the understandably numbers-laden narrative can become overwhelming. Thankfully, the author intersperses each chapter with case studies of nonwealthy individuals who thrived after receiving the “few thousand dollars” during small-scale economic experiments mounted by Prosperity Now and other nonprofits or government agencies—e.g., Minh Tranh, a Vietnamese immigrant who arrived in the U.S. at age 15 speaking no English and is now a successful electrical engineer. Throughout the narrative, the author demonstrates persistence as he addresses myths spread mostly by Republican Party leaders. For instance, Friedman cites evidence that low-income Americans will indeed save money if the money becomes available; they will also spend it on higher education, home ownership, and business opportunities. A small financial windfall provided to the impoverished can decrease psychological depression while increasing positive contributions to society. Friedman argues that prosperity, alternately thought of as “economic well-being,” can become a reality for a much larger proportion of Americans. The book rings with cognitive dissonance, as Friedman pits his optimism about the economic future against the current realities of electoral politics, which seem aimed at increasing income inequality. The author is clearly aware of the dissonance, but he will not give in to discouragement. Sen. Cory Booker, a longtime activist in the area of income inequality, provides the afterword.
A welcome plan from a wealthy man with empathy for the less fortunate.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62097-403-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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