A flawed but ambitious, readable look at economic reformism over the last century.
Labor journalist Pizzigati (Greed and Good: Understanding and Overcoming the Inequality that Limits Our Lives, 2004, etc.) makes the case that graduated tax rates and strong unions once led to an economic golden age for average Americans—and could do so again.
The author focuses on how, since the end of the 19th century, a massive economic gap between the rich and poor in America has sparked populist and progressive ideas. The resulting legislation and regulations, he writes, brought about changes that greatly improved the lives of many Americans by mid-century. But as Pizzigati shows, many of those policies and institutions were weakened or eliminated in later decades, and economic inequality has since grown. By revisiting and reinvigorating those ideas—such as steeply raising taxes on the wealthy—he argues that the gap could be narrowed once more. The author gives due attention to several major historical figures, most notably Franklin D. Roosevelt, but Pizzigati also name checks less-discussed individuals, such as attorney and reformist Amos Pinchot and Colorado congressman Edward Keating. The author also delves into complicated labor history and tax law, examining the many victories and defeats of progressive-leaning policies. However, Pizzigati has an unfortunate tendency to broadly demonize the rich, at one point even taking issue with the wealth of doomed passengers on the Titanic. He is undeniably passionate about his subject and skilled at marshaling information to make his points, but the book seems largely aimed at like-minded readers and may not change the minds of skeptics.
A flawed but ambitious, readable look at economic reformism over the last century.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60980-434-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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
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
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