A wildly frustrating and timely book appropriate for most readers.
Using a couple of heroes and more than a few foils, journalist Rivlin (The Godfather of Silicon Valley: Ron Conway and the Fall of the Dot-coms, 2001, etc.) dives into the dog-eat-dog world of Poverty, Inc.
Amid the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, countless captains of the poverty industry continue to thrive on the measly paychecks of working-class citizens. Check cashers, payday lenders (who used to be called “loan sharks”) and pawnbrokers spread throughout the United States, cropping up in low-income neighborhoods like weeds. Allan Jones, Chairman and CEO of Check Into Cash, is one of those weeds. He is also a world-class finger-pointer. According to Jones, the 2008 global collapse is the fault of one man: Martin Eakes, “who, in the mid-1990s, convinced the Federal National Mortgage Association—Fannie Mae—to help his organization, the Center for Community Self-Help, create a first-of-its-kind secondary market to buy and sell subprime mortgages.” Eakes did make subprime loans as far back as 1984, but Self-Help drew a line at targeting uneducated people living on fixed incomes, payday’s so-called “perfect customers.” Payday lenders sprung up in 1996, when the Ohio legislature “voted to exempt small, short-term loans from the state’s 28 percent usury cap, thereby legalizing payday lending.” Once the banks started buying up payday and cash-advance businesses, they went to work in Washington with a bipartisan group of lobbyists. Even a former chief of staff for Clinton served on a board of “swat team” advisors for Household Finance Corp., one the most infamous and cavalier subprime lenders. Recent legislation has managed to temper the more extreme interest rates, but the weeds continue to sprout despite measures to stomp them out. One crude and ironic point driven home capably by Rivlin is the fact that as long as the working poor need money, payday lenders will be there “help.” As a now-bankrupt former millionaire put it, “You can make more money off the rich but it carries a much bigger risk…The thing about the poor people’s economy…is that basically it’s recession proof. You’re always going to have people who need $100 or $200 real quick.”
A wildly frustrating and timely book appropriate for most readers.Pub Date: June 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-173321-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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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