An investment banker's sophisticated audit of the geopolitical and socioeconomic forces that could shape the postmillennial world. Unlike many for-profit prophets, Knoke resists the temptation to present facts as forecasts. Instead, he focuses on underestimated developments and already discernible trends that could determine the course of future events. Given ongoing advances in the state of the telecommunications/computer art and continuous improvements in transport, for example, the author argues that planet Earth has acquired a fourth dimension, one that makes place appreciably less important than once was the case. Employing this provocative premise as a starting point, he moves on to assert that capital, labor, and raw materials will play diminishing roles in the global economy during the years ahead. In his view, the same holds true for central banks, depository institutions, gigantic corporations, and other mainstays of the past, including nation- states. Among other outcomes, Knoke predicts the emergence of new organizational forms (e.g., multilocals rather than multinationals) with relatively small headquarters staffs, an increasing incidence of corporate spin-offs, the creation of more microstates (in Western Europe as well as the erstwhile USSR), the spread of democracy, and the redeployment of surplus workers. The author also sees a host of other eventualities over the horizon. Cases in point range from the challenges of terrorism, tribal conflict, and environmental degradation through the possibility that the WTO represents a first step toward world government, the likelihood the Global Village's children will become a database (thanks to the Internet), and the possibility that Islamic fundamentalists may face the same fate as the Bolsheviks. Perceptive perspectives on what tomorrow might hold for the family of man and its commercial enterprises. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-56836-095-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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