A brief but refreshingly broad-minded take on global economics that is invigorated by the tension between capitalism and...
Levine, a medical doctor and Ph.D. who studies global trends in medicine and economics, explains how the destiny of capitalism means embracing what some mistakenly see as its mortal enemy: government regulation.
Capitalism and government need not be at odds, argues Levine. In stark contrast to proponents of laissez-faire economics, Levine contends the future of capitalism actually requires government intervention. He advocates “balanced capitalism”—a system in which a capitalistic economy is counterweighted with some socialistic legislation. “Such balancing leads to both the stability and prosperity of a society,” he writes. The role of government, in Levine’s view, should be that of an “arbiter” seeking equilibrium between the interests of business and labor. Balanced capitalism is the result of evolutionary process unfolding worldwide—and not just in democratic nations: At the moment, Levine says, it’s “working better for dictatorial China than for democratic America [mainly because] China is able to better regulate the balance between capital and labor.” In the most controversial of the book’s claims, Levine contends that China’s rise to the world’s second-largest economy offers lessons to the United States: “Government regulation is a part of [China’s] dictatorial regime, whereas over the last several decades America erroneously abandoned constant regulation of economics and embraced self-regulation.” The book’s straight-laced prose lacks vigor, but Levine skillfully articulates his views in basic terms, making his arguments graspable to those with just an undergraduate understanding of economics. Instead of supply-demand charts and statistical data, he relies on big-picture theories and historical perspective. The best chapters flow like well-polished précis, while the less substantive ones read more like CliffsNotes. In particular, students of economist Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate, will find much to take issue with. Levine believes that embracing Friedman’s ideas of limited government involvement in free markets has resulted in dangerous levels of inequality and various other problems. Instead, Levine argues, America should return to the philosophy championed by Lewis Henry Morgan and John Maynard Keynes to restore widespread prosperity. Levine envisions a mutually accommodative approach, with Uncle Sam as a referee ensuring a level playing field for both Main Street and Wall Street.
A brief but refreshingly broad-minded take on global economics that is invigorated by the tension between capitalism and government.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0692017814
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Victor Levine
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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