A timely wake-up call.
Journalist Fishman (China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World, 2006) takes a sober, in-depth look at the challenge of providing for an aging population.
By artfully juxtaposing anecdotal evidence of the lucky ones who have “cheated at the actuarial tables”—e.g., his 80-something mother who dances at swinging parties, and youthful 75-year-old retirees living it up in Florida, “God’s Waiting Room”—with the dependent elderly unable to care for themselves, the author makes a convincing case that we must be prepared to pay a significant price for the increased longevity of the world’s population. While not denying that a healthy lifestyle is an important factor in allowing an increasing number of people to enjoy an active life into their 70s and beyond, Fishman sees the extension of longevity as a problematic global phenomenon, primarily the result of abundant and reliable food, improved public-health measures and more accessible and effective antibiotics. An unintended consequence of a longer-lived population is the increase of the frail elderly, who will place an increasing burden on younger people who make up the workforce and who will be called upon as caregivers. While Europeans enjoy the benefit of early retirement and are reluctant to extend their working years, Americans over 55 are having increasing difficulty finding employment. At the same time, more women work outside the home, marry at a later age and are giving birth to fewer children. One answer would be for more older people to continue working, but under the pressures of globalization, Fishman sees the opposite tendency. Companies are driven by global competition to jettison older, higher-paid workers in order to drive down wages while lower-paid women are encouraged to join the workforce without adequate provision for childcare.
A timely wake-up call.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5102-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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