Marked by wit and a determination to unflinchingly look at America’s challenges, Tretten’s book offers a generous assortment...
This miscellany of succinct essays brings a veteran educator’s liberal perspectives to a variety of contemporary issues ranging from national politics to the therapeutic benefits of tennis.
Despite the mild self-effacement in his book’s subtitle, Tretten writes with confidence and an intellectual acuity that reveals no age-related mental slackening. A longtime Bay-area educator, he collects around six dozen brief essays that he sorts into “Society,” “Politics,” “Economics,” “Education” and “Sports.” Those delineations are far from absolute—his progressive political opinions tend to swim across categories. An essay on regular tennis matches with friends shifts quickly into a meditation on ways to prevent political differences among players from contaminating the joy of the sport. Likewise, Tretten’s thoughts about education drift into his critique of ignoble American economic institutions. What holds the book together is Tretten’s generally amiable tone that bridges the apparent contradictions in his personality: he’s a high-brow intellectual with a PhD in education from Stanford University, yet simple vocabulary and conversational vernacular run throughout; he’s emphatic in believing the verity of his liberal politics, yet he’s unafraid to criticize liberal politicians. For someone who has spent most of his long life in public schools as an educator and administrator, he seems relatively disinterested in “hot-button” education issues like educational technology, charter schools and homeschooling. Tretten admits that he’s far more astute in diagnosing the world’s problems than in offering detailed solutions. With his opinions about schools, crime, spending and lifelong learning, he intends to spark reader self-examination and even cross-generational discussions.
Marked by wit and a determination to unflinchingly look at America’s challenges, Tretten’s book offers a generous assortment of liberal mini-editorials that will entertain any political camp.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1463661076
Page Count: 240
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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