A thoughtful, if narrowly focused, public-policy treatise.
A retired civil servant offers a theoretical framework for the study of public administration.
In this book, Lalor (The Story of New Ross 1207-2007, 2007) draws on both his experience working in Ireland’s civil service and his background as an academic at Trinity College, Dublin. He looks at the historical development of public service, enumerates the components of public administration, reviews the existing literature, and analyzes supply and demand for public goods. He concludes that public administration constitutes the most effective means of providing goods and services that aren’t produced by the free market, while it also contains a moral component. After making this proposal, Lalor applies it to existing discussions in the policy arena, such as the shifting boundary between policy creation and implementation, and the nature of public service in an autocratic environment. Appendices address linguistic, psychological, and postmodern evaluations of the theory. The author contends that “public policy should not be merely the outcome of the conflicts of ministers and appointed officials, there must be a unifying core which brings the purposes of public representatives and officials together.” Some readers may find this an overly rational approach to political reality. However, it does serve as an effective basis for evaluating the sector as a whole. The book’s one significant shortcoming is its nearly exclusive emphasis on the United States and English-speaking Europe. There’s no discussion of how the theory applies to China’s centuries-old system of public administration, for instance, and aside from two brief references to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s former governments, there’s no attempt to demonstrate that the theory applies to civil society in non-Western environments. Despite this limitation, however, it provides a useful overview for readers who are interested in the ideas surrounding the provision of public goods.
A thoughtful, if narrowly focused, public-policy treatise.Pub Date: May 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499191059
Page Count: 222
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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