Wessel doesn’t tell you how to think, but he does give you the facts to think more clearly about what needs to be done.
Accessible overview of America’s contentious deficit politics by the Wall Street Journal’s economics editor.
Anticipating another summer of posturing and gridlock over the federal budget as President Obama’s re-election hopes and the majority of both houses of Congress hang in the balance, Wessel (In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic, 2009, etc.) provides a slender but highly informative volume designed to give voters a grip on what exactly is at stake in this corrosive battle. He begins by clarifying some common misunderstandings: Almost two-thirds of the budget gets spent automatically, with or without the consent or amendment of the current Congress; the U.S. defense budget exceeds those of the next 17 largest powers (including Russia and China) combined; Americans pay less of their income in taxes than citizens of any other developed nation, and have been paying less and less in taxes for 30 years. Wessel then tries to answer the most basic questions about the deficit: how we got here, where the money goes and comes from, and why we need to solve the problem sooner rather than later. He’s the least successful on the last question; the best argument seems to be, “Because everyone thinks so.” Wessel cites experts from left and right, including Paul Krugman and Paul Ryan, among others, without stating a preference for any side. (The hero of the story seems to be Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a nonideological Democrat who, as a congressman, helped forge agreements that made the surpluses of the 1990s possible.) Without explicitly recommending a course, Wessel makes clear that a solution to the problem would necessarily be repugnant to all sides and would include some major changes to entitlement programs as well as increases in taxes for at least several years.
Wessel doesn’t tell you how to think, but he does give you the facts to think more clearly about what needs to be done.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3614-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown Business
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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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