Readers with an interest in global political trends will want to consult this skillfully argued book.
A sobering assessment of recent history as a string of poorly managed catastrophes.
Gathering and updating three previously published reports, Judis voices an intriguing thesis: that “all the decades of modern history—beset by the emergence of rival nation-states and imperialisms, the ups and downs of global capitalism, war, and natural disasters—can be described as times of crisis.” One of the increasingly evident trends Judis identifies is the democratic world’s willingness to slide into authoritarianism as a response to these challenges. That tendency comes from both left and right, which agree on a few points, especially inequality and the problems of globalism and neoliberalism. To these the right adds “an exclusionary nationalism that limited who was included in ‘the people,’ and charged elites with coddling an outsider group of illegal immigrants, refugees, or Muslims.” The American exponent of such values, Donald Trump, gained office because of his appeal to those left behind by economic progress. However, the author also argues that Hillary Clinton “ran an extraordinarily inept campaign (ignoring those areas of the country that had been hard hit by neoliberal neglect).” Judis reaches back several decades to identify the origins of the modern revivals of populism and nationalism on the one hand and socialism on the other. One proponent of a recognizably modern nationalism was Ross Perot, who led the race against Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush until losing credibility by claiming that “the Black Panther Party, on contract with the Viet Cong, had once tried to break into his house.” But then, as Judis notes in his on-the-ground reporting from Arizona on the promulgation of new exclusionary laws in 2010, he observed that many people were in mortal fear that “al-Qaeda operatives were sneaking across the border.” The author projects that the class and geographical (urban vs. rural) divide is likely to grow, and with it, the problems he so cogently analyzes.
Readers with an interest in global political trends will want to consult this skillfully argued book.Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73591-360-5
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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