An intellectually scrupulous study that brings a complex political issue into sharp relief.
Verrier presents a critique of the two-party system in American politics.
Most citizens of the United States are frustrated with the endless hyper-partisanship that plagues their country’s government, observes the author, and they’re equally disenchanted with the representation provided by the two-party system. In fact, he asserts,many interpret the past 168 years of “Democratic-GOP domination” as a “chronic, debilitating disease.” Republicans and Democrats have never been farther apart, he says; the ideological distance between them has grown so vast that the expression of “obvious acrimony, if not outright hatred” has become the norm. However, overturning this arrangement is nearly impossible, as the entire electoral system is designed to enshrine it; even the Federal Election Commission favors the two-party setup. Also, Verrier says, even independent voters generally neglect alternative candidates in favor of the those offered by traditional parties, according to a Pew Research report. In this tightly argued, empirically rigorous study, the author paints a bleak picture of what he calls the “fracturing of American society,” and the ways in which the ideological gap between the parties is encouraged by the American electoral system. Verrier vividly compares the major parties to professional sports teams: “Those two teams destined for the showdown—year after year after year—may overlook the other ‘competition’ and spend the whole regular season trash-talking each other,” he says, but the pair do agree on at least one thing: that no other teams should play the game. The author’s command of the material is impressive, as when he details the condition of independent candidates in every single state for the 2018 general election. However, some readers may find his granular presentation of it to be overwhelming, and he also makes no attempt to furnish a “specific blueprint for change.” Instead, he presents a forlorn “big picture” without hope. Nevertheless, Verrier’s survey is a remarkably exacting one, and brings great clarity to an important topic.
An intellectually scrupulous study that brings a complex political issue into sharp relief.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1476689456
Page Count: 231
Publisher: McFarland
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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