by Tracy Campbell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 8, 2005
Valuable data for those seeking electoral reform in the age of hanging chads, gerrymandered districts and absent absentees.
Still upset by the events of 2000 and 2004? It won’t cheer you to learn from this wide-ranging book that election-rigging is a time-honored American institution.
Political historian Campbell (Short of the Glory, 1998) admits to having been dismayed at the results of the 2000 presidential election. Yet, she writes, it was strange solace to know “that the process itself was deeply corrupted and had been so for over two hundred years.” The corruption she charts is satisfyingly varied in terms of both geography and levels of wrongdoing, from George Washington’s practice of buying votes to Boss Tweed and Richard Daley’s absolutist control over the ballot boxes of New York and Chicago to the dirty tricks of the Nixon era and beyond. Sometimes the corruption is of a forgivable nature, as when absentee ballots cast by Civil War soldiers were ignored lest they give the Union presidency to a Democratic peace candidate; other times it is simply sleazy, as when the president of the country’s leading manufacturer of voting machines promised to deliver the vote to Dubya lest the presidency go to a Democratic peace candidate. It is cold comfort to know that the sleaziest and most corrupt districts in the country lie in the South, and that they’ve been that way forever; Florida and Louisiana, it seems, can always be counted on to miscount the vote, and there’s even a verb among political insiders, “to plaquemine,” that honors (or dishonors) ever-corrupt Plaquemines Parish outside New Orleans. But there are plenty of Northern sinners, too, and Campbell does an evenhanded job of chronicling such things as the near-theft of the Wisconsin governorship in 1856—thwarted by a state Supreme Court that “displayed how an independent judiciary can play a vital constitutional role in overseeing contested elections”—and the curiosities of Ohio (and, for good measure, Ukraine) in 2004.
Valuable data for those seeking electoral reform in the age of hanging chads, gerrymandered districts and absent absentees.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1591-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
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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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
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
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