A valuable resource crafted with intelligence and thoroughness.
A practical and philosophical consideration of the moral dilemmas that arise during estate planning.
One’s last will is more than just a legal document—it’s also a skein of tangled ethical conundrums that raises profound philosophical questions about the scope of individual freedom, weighed against the demands of social justice. Author Dixon-Mueller (Population Policy and Women’s Rights, 1993, etc.) has written a concise but comprehensive guide to navigating these murky waters that considers the full range of stakeholders and competing principles. She begins by sketching a synoptic history of the very idea of inheritance, discussing its ancient iteration within the Roman Republic and its several permutations through the American Colonial period until today, showing how shifts in popular attitudes to inheritance were partly a function of changing social and moral norms. Then the author discusses broader issues of equity that pull the reader into the realm of political philosophy, pitting freedom against the collective needs of society and, by extension, interrogating the proper scope of state regulation. While she provides practical guidance regarding potentially challenging conversations about the way in which one bequeaths one’s property, she artfully dedicates much of the work to raising and refining, in almost a Socratic fashion, moral problems that might be easy to miss. For example, Dixon-Mueller sensitively discusses the difficulties posed by sentimental heirlooms and contradictory claims to them. Also, she discusses problems that arise when determining the proper timing of disbursement of property: what if one’s adult children could use that wealth now, well in advance of one’s passing? The entire work is laced with a kind of pragmatic optimism; although many of these puzzles may seem intractable, the author is confident that reasonable solutions can be found: “balances can be struck; that is part of the challenge.” Overall, this is a marvelously accessible book, which is remarkable given its philosophic depth and rigor.
A valuable resource crafted with intelligence and thoroughness.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5469-9147-2
Page Count: 194
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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