A sound, if eclectic, take on America’s sociopolitical woes.
A solutions-oriented book offers a critique of the 21st-century’s political status quo.
It’s not difficult to “find imperfections in all walks of American life,” Zecola notes in the first line of his work, “from its rules, to its leaders, to its economic policies and so forth.” Divided into six parts that examine the disconcertingly imperfect state of America’s rules, leadership, policies, markets, industry, and future, the volume paints a bleak picture. Though the six elements analyzed are different, they are all interconnected in the author’s convincing account because their problems stem from an anti-democratic “unbalance” in American politics. The constitutional allotment of influence, for instance, gives small, mostly White and rural states “the power to block the will of the majority of the people.” Similarly, the book contends that Evangelicals, a demographic minority, have “orchestrated a jury-rigged Supreme Court that has eliminated 50 years of women’s rights, restricted gun control, and restricted measures to curb pollution.” And while offering well-reasoned solutions to a myriad of issues, including providing career advice to the unemployed and those entering the workforce, the work presents an ultimate solution that boils down to the need for a renewed democratic ethos whereby “voters become engaged” and retake control of the mechanisms of government. Although the volume’s idealistic final answer may come off as Pollyannaish, its critiques are grounded in a dishearteningly realistic approach. Many of its sharpest barbs are reserved for the religious right (whose “anti-abortion viewpoint is based upon nothing more than a misunderstanding of the reproduction process”) and Donald Trump (who “turned lying into an art form”). But this is not simply a partisan polemic. Democrats, for instance, are criticized for their “out-of-control” spending as well as their general apathy toward protecting democratic norms from conservative incursions. At 153 pages, the book offers a concise critique of the existing state of America with a well-informed, accessible writing style reflecting Zecola’s background as a successful entrepreneur, corporate executive, and government official. But the volume’s lack of citations may disappoint readers looking for a more scholarly approach.
A sound, if eclectic, take on America’s sociopolitical woes.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 153
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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