A defensive but astute, cerebral, and engrossing polemic that conveys knowledge and authority.
The former Greek finance minister argues that the lack of political will and democratic consensus in the euro crisis portends a drift toward authoritarianism.
Having served as finance minister in 2015 during the face-off with the Eurogroup on behalf of Greece—the weakest defaulting European Union member—Varoufakis (Economic Theory/Univ. of Athens; Europe after the Minotaur: Greece and the Future of the Global Economy, 2015, etc.) reaches back into not-so-distant economic history to make a convincing case that the EU is bungling the current debt crisis, especially in regards to the weakest links in the union. The original design for a viable worldwide financial system was hammered out at Bretton Woods by the Allies in July 1944, as D-Day was just getting underway—although, the author notes, the Nazis had first envisioned a European monetary union as early as 1938. The United States pledged to bolster European currencies, a shock-absorbing system already put in place in the U.S. The deal worked until 1971’s “Nixon Shock,” whereby Washington grew exasperated with the recalcitrant Europeans and jettisoned them from the dollar zone. Thus, the Europeans were set adrift to conjure their own Bretton Woods, culminating in the euro, yet without the shock absorbers, causing massive debt default in the crisis of 2008 and prodding “Europe to turn in on itself.” How could this have happened? With scathing humor, Varoufakis portrays the dramatic characters: the deficit-phobic Bundesbank; the exquisitely efficient, autocratic French administrators in Brussels; and the earnest Americans (especially Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner), who warned against “teach[ing] the Greeks a lesson.” Indeed, the lesson posited by this well-read Greek academic is the necessity of respecting the demos lest the beleaguered people “come back to strike at the foundation” of the state. The appendix is an extract from “A Modest Proposal for Resolving the Eurozone Crisis,” which the author co-wrote with Stuart Holland and J.K. Galbraith.
A defensive but astute, cerebral, and engrossing polemic that conveys knowledge and authority.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56858-504-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2016
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
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