Prognostication is always a risky business, but Greenberg makes a good case for a near-term future in which tea partiers and...
If demography is destiny, then it would appear that the Republicans are in big trouble.
Democratic pollster Greenberg takes up the argument he began to unfold in America Ascendant (2015): The GOP is fighting a war, mostly on the cultural front, that it cannot hope to win, its “original sin” being the much-in-the-news war on women’s rights to control their own bodies. This culture war is being waged by a bloc of evangelical states that are ever less important in the electoral mix, in large part because millennials, who tend to be socially liberal, are moving to the big cities, depopulating the countryside, and turning that culture war into an urban-vs.-rural battleground that the moribund white majority will eventually lose. Try as it might, the Trump administration cannot change the fact that the foreign-born populations of the U.S. is growing, with 12 million foreign-born migrants swelling the population of the nation’s cities and suburbs. Given that “every religious denomination is coping with drops in the number of those who are religiously observant,” and given that younger people generally support gay marriage and multiculturalism, it’s the GOP’s world to lose. That said, as Greenberg notes, there’s still the business of messaging: The Democrats, he argues, have to change their notion that government can be a ladder to lift the poor and instead hammer on the more robust point that American workers need a level playing field. “Working people are no fools,” writes the author, and they’re now seeing the effects on their paychecks and lives of tariffs, cuts in health care and social services, and the like. Winning the blue-collar white vote won’t be the easiest thing, Greenberg allows, but Trump lost significant numbers of those voters between 2016 and 2018—and 2020 is coming up fast.
Prognostication is always a risky business, but Greenberg makes a good case for a near-term future in which tea partiers and Trumpies will be largely irrelevant.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31175-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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
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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