As indeed, anyone reading Hutton’s useful, sobering study is likely to conclude: we do.
Who’s more dangerous to world peace: Saddam or a golf-playing, pension fund–robbing, churchgoing Republican?
It’s a close tie by London Observer columnist Hutton’s account. American neoconservatism, he repeatedly warns throughout this thoughtful survey of US-European relations—originally published for a British audience, but perfectly accessible on this side of the pond—is a dangerous force, not only for the larger world but also for the US, which neoconservatism is threatening to bankrupt both financially and morally, destroying the once great promise of social mobility and equal opportunity for all in the name of “self-interested callousness masquerading as morality and economic efficiency.” Exponents such as George W. Bush are famous believers in American exceptionalism, of course, but, Hutton suggests, they no longer have any reason to crow that America is the greatest country on earth; plenty of European Union members have stronger economies in real terms (rather than pull out profits at every turn, Hutton writes, “Europeans have chosen to invest heavily in order to work shorter weeks, have longer vacations, and still produce the same as, if not more than, Americans”), and most corners of Europe honor the same rights and values as did our formerly democratic nation. American superiority in such matters, Hutton concludes, is nothing but a myth. Moreover, he insists, the determination of the current president to go it alone damages what little credibility the US has left in international circles—a disservice to both the American nation and the world. Still, Hutton argues, Bush and cronies are not the real America; the majority, at least the majority who voted for Gore and Nader in the last election, “show an almost European readiness to spend extra on education, health, and social security” and are disinclined to force a self-serving moral agenda on the rest of the world—which, Hutton argues, “has been lucky over the twentieth century that at key junctures the politicians running the United States, and the dominant discourse, have been liberal. We need them back.”
As indeed, anyone reading Hutton’s useful, sobering study is likely to conclude: we do.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05725-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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