Great booster writing offering many exciting possibilities for America’s future.
Fasten your seat belts. If Kurtzman (Startups that Work: Surprising Research on What Makes or Breaks a New Company, 2005, etc.) is right, the American economy is fueled for an unprecedented takeoff into a new era of economic growth.
The author, former editor in chief of both Harvard Business Review and Strategy + Business, has little patience for the “doomsayers” and the “doomsday preppers” born of political negativity. Though he agrees that fearmongering is not a crime, he sets out to reassert America's immense strengths and bright future. Kurtzman assumes that the fuel for the coming economic surge will be provided by four transformational forces: 1) the continuing strengths of the country's manufacturing sector (still the world's largest and most productive); 2) the rapid approach of energy self-sufficiency; 3) the accumulation of around $5 trillion in the bank accounts of corporations and reserves of the banking system; 4) the promising future of collaboration among government, university research and the private sector (this may be the most intriguing to many readers). Kurtzman takes readers on a tour through the multiple world-class medical-research institutions that have set up shop in Boston, companies that exemplify how pioneering advances in medicine and medical technology are being made at a rapid rate. For decades, the author argues, America's manufacturing and economic strengths have been based on advanced research and the development of a strong educational infrastructure—e.g., Boston-based MIT. Now, that tripartite collaboration is producing a new generation of technology based on robotics, much of which will begin to nullify the cost advantage of outsourced labor. “For the United States, the future looks bright,” writes Kurtzman. “The country has abundant new sources of energy, high levels of creativity, the world’s largest manufacturing base—which is getting larger—and enough private capital to turn anyone’s plan into reality.”
Great booster writing offering many exciting possibilities for America’s future.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-309-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
