A rousing, well-argued defense of global trade in a time of isolationist entrenchment.
Tariffs be damned: Global trade is a net good, and any consumer should be grateful for it.
Hochberg, former president of the Export-Import Bank, served as CEO of Lillian Vernon Corporation, the firm his mother founded “at our kitchen table.” In working there, he writes, he and his family were hot on the heels of Richard Nixon in opening up to China, where, though modernization had yet to hit in 1972, they offered products and materials that were unavailable or much more expensive in the West. Making China a modern villain in the trade wars is misguided, he argues. Granted that “with the largest workforce on the planet, massive state-owned enterprises, and a desire to dominate high-value manufacturing sectors, it took very little time for China to become a formidable competitor for export business”; competition is what it’s all about. Hochberg surveys several products and categories to make his case: Everyone like tacos, after all, but the components of tacos alone reflect the interplay of trade, with parts coming from nearly every continent. Just so, many people would be lost without their smartphones, which are made from materials gathered in Africa, designed in the U.S. and Europe, and manufactured in China and other Asian nations. The author digs deeper: Consider that half a century ago, all 50 states found it necessary to pass “lemon laws” to protect consumers from badly made cars; now such things are objects of antiquity given that stiff global competition has made every automaker up its game. There are disincentives aplenty, on the other hand, for “nativizing” trade. One of Hochberg’s most pointed examples is the Foxconn plant that will open next year in Wisconsin through the largest subsidy (at about $4 billion) ever given to a firm and at the cost of seizing private property through eminent domain and breaking all sorts of environmental laws “in the hope that this Taiwanese company will prove to be a good bet.”
A rousing, well-argued defense of global trade in a time of isolationist entrenchment.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-98-212736-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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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