A sort of All the President’s Men for our time, and just the thing to lure bright young people into economics graduate...
The story of the century—the 21st, that is—is the ongoing financial crisis that has threatened to bring the developed world to its knees. Why business writers didn’t see it coming is the big question this collection of essays seeks to answer.
The collapse that led to the Great Recession came, writes Schiffrin (School of International and Public Affairs/Columbia Univ.), at a perfect-storm time for journalism, when collapsing advertising revenues and “the ensuing layoffs and staff cuts . . . made journalists fear for their jobs and perhaps more afraid to stand out from the rest of the pack.” And that was for the journalists who still had jobs, since some 30,000 nationwide had been eliminated, along with entire newspapers and magazines. Despite the generalized sense of guilt and shame about the failure to warn readers about the catastrophe, there was largely nothing to be done about it, since the business media had also become “embedded” inside Wall Street in the same way that war correspondents are embedded inside combat units. In these positions, the journalists were loath to report the unpleasant truths—if they were capable of doing so at all, given that few business reporters have the requisite understanding of economics to give a big-picture view of events by taking inches-thick reports home and reading between the lines to discern such startling revelations as, according to Washington Post writer Dan Froomkin, “the middle class may never be the same again” and “the hugely irresponsible financial sector remains unchastened.” Some contributors note external reasons for the failure of the business press, not least the obfuscations and outright lies of Wall Street. In all events, as New York Times writer Peter Goodman writes, it was hard to do deep interpretation and forecasting when “we had our hands full simply trying to make sense of the crush of events unfolding day after day.” Other contributors include Joseph Stiglitz and Barry Sussman.
A sort of All the President’s Men for our time, and just the thing to lure bright young people into economics graduate programs and journalism school—if only there were jobs waiting on the other end.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59558-549-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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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