Bates’s comprehensive scholarship and his field experience in developing nations give this dense, closely argued text a...
A slender but challenging monograph exploring the role of violence in economies and societies.
Bates (Government/Harvard Univ.) fuses economic and political theory to analyze the transformation of societies from rural to urban and from agricultural to industrial. He argues that as this transition occurs, sometimes people employ violence—and the threat of violence—to strengthen rather than disrupt the system of production. He uses the example of coffee-growing in Kenya to illustrate one of his principal theses about development: “It involves the taming of violence and the delegation of authority to those who will use power productively.” People practice violence in agrarian societies, Bates argues, for one of two reasons: to increase wealth or to defend possessions. He presents the Nuer of southern Sudan, who avoided violence by establishing a nascent form of the weapons policy later implemented by the superpowers: mutually assured destruction. Because everyone knew their neighbors were able and willing to fight to defend their property, the Nuer experienced only rare instances of theft. By contrast, Bates shows clearly that countries like Uganda, where instability and violence are endemic, fail to develop because there is no incentive for investment in a future that is so fragile; people live for the moment, taking what they want by force. Bates then examines the growth of states and the consequences of the Cold War’s end. When the USSR collapsed, he notes, the United States lost interest—and reduced investments—in former clients like Somalia, whose strategic value had vanished overnight. The author also presents convincing evidence that developing nations sowed the seeds of their own destruction during the international debt crisis of the 1980s when they adopted protectionist policies for their industrial products. They simply could not produce and export enough goods to earn the money to repay their enormous loans.
Bates’s comprehensive scholarship and his field experience in developing nations give this dense, closely argued text a force that will strike even general readers. (3 maps, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05038-6
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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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