Solid reporting combined with engaging stories—even about campaign finance reform.
A blistering account of concerted Republican efforts to quiet the political voices of minorities, students, and the poor.
Drawing on his work at MSNBC, where he is a national reporter, Roth debuts with a troubling overview of the many ways in which conservatives have worked to restrict voting, hamper campaign finance reform, and gerrymander Congress in the hope of undermining democracy. “Republican politicians and operatives, conservative lawyers, and grassroots activists,” writes the author, have been engaged in a “guerrilla effort to maintain a hold on power and fight off a progressive agenda” since President Barack Obama’s first election in 2008. They have done so out of a “profound skepticism about the consequences of democracy itself”—a serious belief that many citizens are uninformed, with little stake in their community, and that high-quality, civic-minded voters and corporations know what is best for society. Roth’s succinct, well-written report examines disparate events and rulings of the past decade, arguing that conservative efforts to thwart the popular will have gone beyond partisan politics and are dismissive of the democratic process. Since 2006, more than 20 states have created laws making it harder to vote (requiring voter IDs, cutting early voting, etc.). In key decisions, especially the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court has eviscerated campaign finance laws, “ushering in a flood of political money that threatens to warp American democracy beyond recognition.” At the local level, conservatives have blocked laws passed by progressive cities and counties that provide paid sick leave and improved wages for food service workers. The author also shows how judicial activism has used “constitutional minutiae” to limit the power of the people. Roth claims that distrust of universal suffrage has deep roots in American society, as evinced in the writings of individuals from historian Frances Parkman, who in 1878 said workmen and foreigners cared “nothing” for the public good, to conservative Samuel Huntington, who complained of an “excess of democracy” 100 years later.
Solid reporting combined with engaging stories—even about campaign finance reform.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90576-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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