by William S. Dietrich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1991
As good and thoughtful a case as has been made for a US industrial policy—defined by businessman Dietrich as the state's purposeful allocation of resources to high-tech enterprises with the capacity to add substantive value. In his evenhanded, well-reasoned appraisal of America's inability to compete on equal terms with Japan in a host of basic and emergent fields, Dietrich (helmsman of a steel-processing and building-products firm in Pittsburgh) parts company with most latter-day Jeremiahs. Instead of amassing anecdotal evidence attesting to Japan's widening edge, he accepts the situation as a given and focuses on explaining its origins in cultural terms, comparing America's antistatist traditions as a constitutional democracy to the feudal heritage of an island nation that has an essentially homogeneous population and virtually no ethnic or regional strife. And Japan, Dietrich points out, also has cadres of able civil servants who are above politics and dedicated to advancing the country's interest. The author shows how these professionals (who command the greatest respect) employ a variety of public and private means to the end of making Japan the world's ranking economic power. By contrast, he observes, career bureaucrats in the US have precious little prestige, let alone authority; nor are political appointees able to accomplish much during their typically brief tenures. Unfortunately, Dietrich concludes, America can no longer afford its instinctive commitment to free markets and free trade, much less unfettered individualism. Indeed, he argues, the US should take its economic conflicts with Japan at least as seriously as the erstwhile cold war with the Soviet bloc. If it fails to meet this challenge, the nation risks losing significant measures of autonomy not only to Japan but also to other East Asian and European countries that have embraced the statist approach. Although less than hopeful about any immediate or meaningful change, Dietrich proposes systemic reforms that would commit the US to a coherent as well as comprehensive economic strategy. A no-nonsense audit that puts a consequential dilemma in disturbing perspective.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-271-00765-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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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