A closely argued study of the merits and demerits of free market economics in action.
The history of the economic shock that accompanied the right-wing military coup in Chile in 1973.
In 1955, the U.S. State Department launched a project in which Chilean economists were trained in the free market fundamentalism of Milton Friedman. When Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of Salvador Allende, “the first Marxist politician to be freely elected as a head of state in any country,” the “Chicago Boys,” as they were called, went to work undoing Allende’s socialist reforms and installing policies that included the privatization of social security, the use of school vouchers, and the abolition of thousands of regulations. As Edwards, a professor of economics and former chief economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank, writes, the economists “would soon find out how different pontificating from the ivory tower was from actually implementing policies aimed at changing decades of entrenched policies.” Still, Chile eventually found its footing as a bastion of neoliberalism, and in the early 2000s, “Chile became, by a wide margin, the wealthiest nation in Latin America.” The nation was also marked by predatory capitalism and shocking inequality, a situation that was just fine by Friedman but was anathema to the working people of Chile—and was “a serious weakness that was mostly ignored by the architects of the model and that would come to haunt them.” Additionally, given that neoliberalism is globalist, Chile was long hampered in international trade by its status as a pariah nation thanks to the very military dictatorship that had brought the Chicago Boys to the fore. For all its successes, neoliberal Chile came to suffer from the failure of privatized social security. With the election of the leftist activist Gabriel Boric to the presidency in 2021, Chile is now abandoning many Chicago tenets in order to “move away from markets and competition.” Throughout, Edwards maintains a detailed yet accessible narrative.
A closely argued study of the merits and demerits of free market economics in action.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780691208626
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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