Certain to hearten that considerable portion of the country impatient for the clock to run out on this beleaguered...
PBS commentator and former Boston Globe correspondent Oliphant excoriates all things Bush.
Although he frankly confesses his left-of-center bias, Oliphant insists that it’s not his own political perspective, but rather the behavior of the Bush administration that accounts for the severe judgment rendered here. On the list of Bush missteps, mistakes and missed opportunities, Oliphant (Praying For Gil Hodges: A Memoir of the 1955 World Series and One Family’s Love of the Brooklyn Dodgers, 2005) gives pride of place to the war in Iraq, a “blunder of epic proportions” that threatens to obscure the administration’s many other disasters. Bush’s astonishing ineptitude, he argues, extends to issues ranging from energy to education to healthcare, from the economy to the environment. The president has failed to protect Americans from terrorist threats and to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He is unable to control the country’s porous borders, and he’s incapable of handling natural disasters like Katrina. Not to mention the fact that he’s presided over the ruination of America’s international reputation. By confining himself to a tight inner circle that shielded him from scrutiny or accountability, by allowing ideology and special-interest cronyism to govern his decisions, by his poor work habits and his preference for imagery over accomplishment, by his willful refusal to consider serious alternatives and, then, to carefully monitor the execution of his policies, Bush has ineptly—and, so infuriating to his critics, arrogantly—run an administration certain to be condemned by history. By the end of this polemic, Oliphant drops all pretense of sober assessment: “It wasn’t just Iraq … [i]t was everything.” Really? Everything? While marginally better written than the raft of recent Bush-bashing books, Oliphant’s screed suffers from the same sin as most of these efforts: overkill. Perhaps history will judge the Bush administration every bit the irredeemable enterprise Oliphant supposes, but his refusal to identify even a single accomplishment, even one admirable feature of the president’s stewardship, leaves the reader as skeptical of Oliphant’s judgment as of the president’s.
Certain to hearten that considerable portion of the country impatient for the clock to run out on this beleaguered administration.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36017-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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