A fresh, astute examination of current events and urgent challenges.
A cogent argument for why scientific and political debates must account for feelings of victimhood, fear, and betrayal.
Clashes between “cold objectivity” and “emotive falsehood,” between knowledge-based fact and visceral feeling, pervade contemporary discourse. Davies (Politics and International Relations/Goldsmiths, Univ. of London; The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being, 2015, etc.) offers a penetrating analysis of 21st-century politics and culture in the U.S. and the U.K. Tracing the history of ideas beginning in the Enlightenment, the author transcends the familiar dichotomy of educated/uneducated, urban/rural, cosmopolitan/tribal that has come to explain combative political debate and elections that resulted in Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidency. Davies sees a deepening crisis of trust in science, political representatives, and the professional media, whose practitioners are attacked as “elites” who favor the perspectives of “their own cultural and educational background.” Because the “civil and gentlemanly dimension of expert knowledge never includes everyone as a participant,” expertise has become associated with oppression and exploitation. Libertarians, among others, criticize scientific consensus—about climate change and vaccines, for example—as a “monopoly” and threat to free thought; instead, they promote the market as a valid discriminator between truth and lies: “Reality is all in the eye of the investor, creditor, or shopper.” Along with distrust of experts, Davies notes an erosion of the dichotomy between mind and body, rational thinking and emotive feeling, validated by discoveries in neuroscience and psychology. Feelings of pain, loss, and defeat have spurred the rise of populists, as well as conspiracy theorists, among those who feel disenfranchised and marginalized. Digital networks, rather than supporting “scientific ideals of factual consensus or objectivity,” instead delude users with the belief that the world “will become more obedient” to them. The author sees no prospect that defenders of science and rationality will regain widespread trust as “heroic scientific truth-seekers,” but they can contribute to fulfilling “simple, realistic, and life-changing promises” and creating “new institutions of social contracts and peace.”
A fresh, astute examination of current events and urgent challenges.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63538-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
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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