As with most anti-Trump books, this one will shore up the opinions of those already convinced of his lack of fitness for the...
Mental health professionals and others make the case that Donald Trump is mentally ill, dangerous, or both.
Editor Lee (Law and Psychiatry/Yale School of Medicine) asked for and received submissions for this book within a three-week period, and several of them show signs of being written in haste. Many of the contributors are leading psychologists or psychiatrists; others include journalist Gail Sheehy, Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Trump’s The Art of the Deal, and attorney and “political junkie” James A. Herb, who filed a petition in the Palm Beach County Circuit Court to determine Trump’s mental incapacity in October 2016, “based on the fact that Trump’s apparent lack of mental capacity to function could impact me and possibly the whole world.” The volume is aimed strictly at demonstrating that Trump shouldn’t be in office (admittedly a view held by tens of millions of other Americans) and that a panel of mental health professionals should be established to determine his lack of fitness. At the heart of many of the essays is the increasingly controversial 1973 “Goldwater rule” implemented by the American Psychiatric Association, which states that psychiatrists shouldn’t diagnose public figures without personally examining them. Also frequently cited is the Tarasoff decision made by California in 1976, which states that psychiatrists should speak out when they know that “an individual is dangerous to another person or persons.” Some of the essays border on self-parody: one author argues seriously that “post-Trump stress disorder” ought to be considered “as serious as PTSD.” Read collectively, the essays become repetitious: the contributors lean on the same definitions of narcissism and paranoia and cite the same tweets and passages from speeches, most of which will already be familiar to readers.
As with most anti-Trump books, this one will shore up the opinions of those already convinced of his lack of fitness for the job but won’t change the minds of his supporters, the vast majority of whom won’t read it.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-17945-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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
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
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