A noted economist argues that deep reforms are needed to bring renewed prosperity to the United States—a nation “dangerously out of balance,” where a tiny elite holds wealth and power without regard for their fellow citizens.
Known for his studies of economies in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, Sachs (Healthy Policy and Management/Columbia Univ.; Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, 2008, etc.) weighs in for the first time on America’s economic ills. Drawing on diverse studies and surveys, he characterizes the U.S. as a competitive market society in which “the rich and powerful fail to behave with respect, honesty, and compassion toward the rest of society and toward the world.” From the New Deal through the 1960s, the federal government steered the national economy for the public good. But in the ’80s, power shifted to special interests, whose concern was private advantage, leaving the U.S. economy vulnerable to the 2008 collapse. To restore prosperity, writes Sachs, America must once again have an activist government that works within the market system to create a more balanced economy and a society based on social trust, honesty and compassion. The author writes that most Americans support such reforms, but are misrepresented in Congress, where both parties enact policies “to the right of the public’s true values” to please wealthy contributors. Sachs considers the effects of such forces as globalization, social change and media saturation, and shows how national consensus dissipated as a result of the civil-rights movement, the upsurge in Hispanic immigration, the rise of the Sun Belt and suburbanization. Like social scientist Raj Patel (The Value of Nothing, 2010), Sachs writes that we must abandon the craving for wealth and create a more mindful society. A lucid writer, the author is refreshingly direct—tax cuts for the wealthy are “immoral and counterproductive”; stimulus funding and budget cutting are “gimmicks”—and he offers recommendations for serious reform. An important assessment of what ails America, and a must-read for policymakers.
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6841-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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