At once white paper and polemical study of demographic and epidemiological trends—and a hard glimpse of government’s role in...
A study of the US government’s failure to react meaningfully to an epidemic that “is refashioning the social, economic, and geopolitical dimensions of our world.”
The overstuffed subtitle says it all. When the US citizenry first awakened to the realities of AIDS in the early 1980s and demanded that something be done about it, officialdom was slow to respond; still, by the end of the 1990s, when about one million Americans were infected, the government, writes policy analyst Behrman (Council on Foreign Relations), spent “more than $10 billion per year on the domestic epidemic.” Yet, he adds, “In that same period more than 40 million infections would accrue worldwide. The US would spend little more than $100 million per year on the global dimension” of what was incontestably a global disease. The results are scarifying: more than 8,500 people die each day from AIDS worldwide, and by 2010 it is projected that the number of people affected will grow to at least 100 million. Africa has already been ravaged, Behrman writes: “Approximately 40 percent of adults in Botswana are HIV positive. . . . Life expectancy in Botswana has decreased from seventy-one to thirty-nine years, and in Zimbabwe from seventy to thirty-eight years.” Such statistics did not much sway the well-meaning but perhaps feckless Clinton administration, which failed to lead where leadership was required, while the federal agency charged with providing health leadership “seemed acutely aware of its inadequacy.” Current Secretary of State Colin Powell seemed most aware of AIDS as an issue of national and global security, writes Behrman, and helped change Bush administration policy to a more activist stance—but slowly, and only after it had become apparent that the disease had spread to China, India, and Russia, with potentially devastating consequences.
At once white paper and polemical study of demographic and epidemiological trends—and a hard glimpse of government’s role in world healthcare.Pub Date: June 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-5755-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics,...
A provocative analysis of the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent and the fall of other democracies.
Following the last presidential election, Levitsky (Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America, 2003, etc.) and Ziblatt (Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, 2017, etc.), both professors of government at Harvard, wrote an op-ed column titled, “Is Donald Trump a Threat to Democracy?” The answer here is a resounding yes, though, as in that column, the authors underscore their belief that the crisis extends well beyond the power won by an outsider whom they consider a demagogue and a liar. “Donald Trump may have accelerated the process, but he didn’t cause it,” they write of the politics-as-warfare mentality. “The weakening of our democratic norms is rooted in extreme partisan polarization—one that extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture.” The authors fault the Republican establishment for failing to stand up to Trump, even if that meant electing his opponent, and they seem almost wistfully nostalgic for the days when power brokers in smoke-filled rooms kept candidacies restricted to a club whose members knew how to play by the rules. Those supporting the candidacy of Bernie Sanders might take as much issue with their prescriptions as Trump followers will. However, the comparisons they draw to how democratic populism paved the way toward tyranny in Peru, Venezuela, Chile, and elsewhere are chilling. Among the warning signs they highlight are the Republican Senate’s refusal to consider Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee as well as Trump’s demonization of political opponents, minorities, and the media. As disturbing as they find the dismantling of Democratic safeguards, Levitsky and Ziblatt suggest that “a broad opposition coalition would have important benefits,” though such a coalition would strike some as a move to the center, a return to politics as usual, and even a pragmatic betrayal of principles.
The value of this book is the context it provides, in a style aimed at a concerned citizenry rather than fellow academics, rather than in the consensus it is not likely to build.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6293-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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