An endlessly rewarding book full of takeaways, including the thought that the best societies protect everyone’s rights.
A wide-ranging survey of the conditions of liberty required to steer the world away from the Hobbesian war of each against all.
Why do nations fail? So Acemoglu and Robinson, economists at MIT and the University of Chicago respectively, asked in their 2012 collaboration, Why Nations Fail. Their answer is complex, but it falls largely on the absence or failure of democratic institutions. In this continuation of their previous book, they examine how liberty works: It is not “natural,” not widespread, “is rare in history and is rare today,” and is a fairly recent phenomenon that balances the competing demands of state and society while being reinforced by that balance. For instance, the Athenian constitutional reforms of Cleisthenes “were helpful for strengthening the political power of Athenian citizens while also battling the cage of norms”—that cage of norms being the informal body of customs supplanted by state institutions. Those norms in turn “constrained what the state could do and how far state building could go,” providing their own set of checks. Though somewhat fluid in its definition, liberty, as Acemoglu and Robinson show, is expressed differently under various “leviathans,” to extend the Hobbesian critique. The American Leviathan, for example, does not contend properly with inequality and racial oppression, two enemies of liberty, while the “Paper Leviathan” is a bureaucratic machine favoring the privileged class, serving as both a political and economic brake on development and yielding “fear, violence, and dominance for most of its citizens.” So it is with China, a “Despotic Leviathan” that commands the economy and coerces political conformity. The authors trace a link between democratic states and what they call “Shackled Leviathans,” the beast in restraints being the best of all possible scenarios. Though the argument is a little jargon-y, it is, as with the authors’ previous books, provocative and intuitively correct.
An endlessly rewarding book full of takeaways, including the thought that the best societies protect everyone’s rights.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2438-4
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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