This intriguing but idiosyncratic, often garbled stab at political consensus will most likely put off more people than it...
Conservatives and liberals should come together in fight-the-power populism, argues this scattershot political manifesto.
The answer to problems of legislative gridlock, vicious partisanship and spiraling debt, the author claims, is a national unity platform he dubs “libertarian socialism.” This oxymoronic program draws on inspirations as diverse as the Constitution and Star Trek, but its core principle is an omnidirectional animus against excessive power, public or private: tyrannical TSA air-travel regulations; government infringements of privacy and due process; media monopolies; health insurance companies; sundry “[u]nholy alliances between billion-dollar corporations and millionaire government officials.” On specific issues, Watson’s brand of progressivism is all over the map—and sometimes all over the solar system. (“America should not cede a moon base to China!”) He supports Second Amendment gun rights and makes a forthright case for deploying nuclear power plants as a solution to energy and environmental crises. But he leans left in supporting unions, higher taxes to fund public investment and services, health care reform with a public option, and legalization of marijuana, coca leaves and opium. Yet sometimes he throws in a curveball, like a scheme to select primary candidates through an American Idol–style television contest. Watson’s arguments are sometimes lucid but often shaky; to extend Medicare to everyone, for example, he incoherently proposes that “initial funding will come from all of the IOUs our government owes the people.” He assumes that passionate social controversies over abortion, gay marriage and the like will easily yield to callow expedience and split-the-difference compromise. (America should allow unrestricted entry to all Mexicans who can pass an English test, he contends, in order to absorb the “young and fertile” immigrants it needs and atone for the sins of Yankee imperialism.) As blithely confused as its name, Watson’s libertarian socialism skates past the deep thinking required to address America’s clashing interests and ideologies.
This intriguing but idiosyncratic, often garbled stab at political consensus will most likely put off more people than it wins over.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-1257020928
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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