Energetic and provocative.
A loud call for structural reform in Washington, D.C., Darby’s book demands a leaner, meaner, more effective federal government.
The self-described radical Darby is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. He hopes that his slim but potent cri de coeur will inspire nothing less than another constitutional convention—and a revolutionary reform of governmental bodies that he decries as bloated, redundant and ineffective. To boot, taxes are too high, and our lawmakers spend our money foolishly. To fix this mess, Darby proposes that we take the advice of management experts like Peter Drucker and Jack Welch by downsizing and streamlining. Of course, we’ve heard this all before, both on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and on the lips of almost any Fox News pundit. But what saves Darby’s book from gathering dust on the remainders pile next to Coulter and Hannity is the fact that he also takes up some truly liberal crusades, railing against income inequality, trickledown economics and (more lightly) union-busting. Simply, Darby’s argument is refreshing due to the fact that it feels genuinely nonpartisan. His book’s red meat is his proposal for governmental reorganization. First, and most controversially, he argues that we should follow Nebraska’s lead and establish a unicameral Congress, abolishing the House while empowering (and reallocating) the Senate. He further suggests that this Senate-on-steroids would both appoint the president and elect Supreme Court justices, who would still serve for life. (Perhaps to curb their growing power, Darby would also have us establish stricter term limits for senators.) There’s no question that his plan would stir things up in D.C., which remains in a depressing state of gridlock. But it’s hard to imagine how it’s compatible with our standing commitment to separation of powers; after all, who could keep the new Senate in check? Further, there’s more passion than structure in Darby’s prose, and his sometimes-repetitious narrative would have benefited from following his own advice: streamline and reorganize. That being said, Darby’s goal is to shake things up. And shake things up he does.
Energetic and provocative.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479356317
Page Count: 84
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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