Stern’s T-shirt slogan puts it well: “It’s really not that complicated.” Pipe dream it may be, but this is a book eminently...
Want pie in the sky? How about convincing Americans to accept the “almost un-American” premise of a guaranteed income for all?
It might not be so far-fetched, writes Stern (A Country that Works: Getting America Back on Track, 2006), former president of the Service Employees International Union. Libertarians have agitated for an annual grant to take the place of welfare, while conservatives ought to be on board with the thought that putting a universal basic income in place is a recipe for shrinking social service bureaucracies. As for progressives, it “helps fulfill their dream of ending poverty.” Stern takes a rather roundabout way to get to his central argument, surveying the economy as it has been transformed by technology in the last few years. There are few warehouse jobs today compared to a decade ago, for instance, not just because of the financial collapse, but also because of inventorying techniques made possible only by advanced computers. These days, Kelly Services is responsible for placing not so much stenographers as substitute teachers, taking an onerous and hated job off the backs of already burdened school principals. The argument solidifies with the thesis offered by tech giant Andy Grove that “job creation must be the number one objective of state economic policy,” and job creation follows from the entrepreneurialism unleashed by unencumbered funds. But how much, and how? The specifics are fewer than the diagnostics, but some of the ones that Stern proposes along the way are both interesting and ingenious—encourage offshore companies to return without undue tax penalty, for one, and then set aside some of the proceeds of normal business taxation to fund infrastructure improvements and more. But the overarching one, that of the UBI, is the most interesting of all, and the author does a solid job of making his case without waxing too wild-eyed.
Stern’s T-shirt slogan puts it well: “It’s really not that complicated.” Pipe dream it may be, but this is a book eminently worth talking about.Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61039-625-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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