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PREFERENTIAL POLICIES

AN INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Sowell (A Conflict of Visions, 1986, etc.), the controversial economist from the Hoover Institution, now examines and indicts affirmative action on a worldwide basis. Sowell begins by weighing the preferential policies that majorities have instituted for themselves. In Malaya under the British, for example, the politically dominant Malays received free education while the minority Chinese had to develop and pay for their own. The result, not unexpected to the author, was a greater number of Chinese college graduates—particularly in the hard fields of science and mathematics—than Malays. In today's world, however, most preferential policies exist for the betterment of previously disadvantaged segments of society: blacks and other minorities in the US; the lower castes in India; Maoris in New Zealand. Although most of these policies had clearly established cutoff dates, none has ever been abrogated. When Pakistan was created, for example, an affirmative-action program was begun for the East Bengalis. Although the Bengalis have long since established their own country, the program continues unabated in Pakistan. Aside from their continuity, Sowell finds, preference policies for both majorities and minorities have in common an inability to work. He cites statistics showing how it is the elite of the minorities, those people who need it the least, who benefit the most. He dwells on India because India has the longest history of preferential policies (begun under the British); has experienced the most polarization because of it; and has suffered the most violence from it. Sowell warns of increasing polarization in all countries if present trends continue, repeating how little we truly know of the causes of poverty, and stressing the need for examining results of programs rather than their motivations. Perhaps not the last word on affirmative action, but valuable in pointing out how empirically unproven much of the current thought on that issue is.

Pub Date: June 27, 1990

ISBN: 0688109691

Page Count: 228

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1990

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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