As we head into the presidential primary season, Greenberg’s book couldn’t be timelier, more disturbing for the Republicans,...
A prominent Democratic strategist and pollster lays out a reform agenda for the future.
Pity the Republican Party. Condemned in the 21st century to fighting a rear-guard action against a series of demographic, economic, and social trends that include more racial diversity, stepped-up immigration, differing family structures, new energy sources, and increasing secularism, the GOP continues to battle. Adviser to a variety of center-left politicians, home and abroad, from Bill Clinton to Nelson Mandela, Greenberg (Dispatches from the War Room: In the Trenches with Five Extraordinary Leaders, 2009, etc.) relies on his own research—surveys and focus groups—commentary from economists, political scientists, sociologists, and reporters, and numerous graphs and charts to make this case and to argue for a progressive response to the changes wrought by the technological era. He compares the current moment to the similarly disruptive Industrial Revolution, during which a succession of Democratic presidents initiated a raft of social reforms that sanded off the rough edges of the economy and culture and allowed the nation to become pre-eminent. In smooth, almost chatty prose, Greenberg argues the time is ripe for a bold progressive agenda that addresses the societal perturbations of our own time, that history “is on the side of the ascendant revolutions” that will inevitably overwhelm opponents. Unsurprisingly, the author calls for increased government activism speaking to issues like climate change, wage disparity, the renewal of our cities, our education system, and infrastructure, and a commitment to full employment. To the already converted and those who shudder at the mention of the Koch brothers and laugh at the scrum of Republicans aspiring to the White House, the author’s analysis will appear spot-on. Greenberg’s confident, well-researched, and well-written delivery may even persuade some skeptics. At least half the country though, the soon-to-be-extinct half, according to the author, will remain unconvinced.
As we head into the presidential primary season, Greenberg’s book couldn’t be timelier, more disturbing for the Republicans, or more challenging for those looking to lead the Democrats.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00367-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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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