While the fact that the rich and famous are treated differently is hardly news, this report’s abundance of juicy stories of...
An expansion of Golden’s series of Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal articles on college admissions practices.
Golden, deputy bureau chief at the Journal’s Boston bureau, names names and cites test scores with a vengeance, starting with Al Gore’s and Bill Frist’s sons. He loads each chapter in his easy-reading exposé with choice examples to bear out his assertion that elite universities give preference to well-connected but academically weak applicants. The first five chapters focus on a particular preferential practice at a top-tier private college or university. Thus, Chapter 1 documents how Harvard rewards its big donors by giving the nod to their children and grandchildren; Chapter 2 looks at Duke’s search for and special treatment of the children of prospective donors; Chapter 3 considers Brown’s pursuit of the children of celebrities, such as Michael Ovitz’s son and other Hollywood offspring; and Chapter 4 reveals Notre Dame’s preference for “legacies,” or the children of alumni. At the University of Virginia, the practice of recruiting athletes in such upper-class, prestigious sports as polo, riding and squash comes under scrutiny. Further, Golden questions the practice at many schools of the granting of tax-free tuition waivers to faculty children, and he charges that nonacademic admissions criteria once used to restrict Jewish enrollments are now being used to do the same to high-performing Asian-Americans. He praises Caltech, Cooper Union and Berea College for their selection of students based on academic merit, arguing that these private schools present an alternative admissions-system model that does not jeopardize the ability to build endowments. In his final chapter, the author presents the reforms he believes are necessary to eliminate the preferences of privilege and restore the opportunities for upward social mobility to academically qualified working-class and middle-class students.
While the fact that the rich and famous are treated differently is hardly news, this report’s abundance of juicy stories of outrageous favoritism makes for an absorbing read.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-9796-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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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