A timely contribution to the literature on an urgent issue.
In a book that took 10 years to research and write, journalist Cohn offers a thorough history of the persistent controversy over health care insurance in the U.S.
In other developed countries, writes the author, governments “are firmly in charge, using some form of taxes or mandatory premiums to finance benefits.” But the U.S. has seen an often vociferous debate “over what obligations society has to its most vulnerable members.” Cohn provides an informative overview of health coverage efforts beginning in the 1920s. Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter all supported public health plans, but they faced opposition from private insurers and conservative politicians. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan led that opposition as president, tapping into widespread anger over federal support programs. Bill Clinton’s efforts to devise a plan encountered opposition from multiple fronts, including within his own party. In 2006, as governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney instituted bold reforms that gave the state’s citizens better access to health care and increased financial security, a model that later inspired Obama’s plans for national health care. Nevertheless, in 2010, Scott Brown won election as senator from Massachusetts by attacking Romney’s measure “as a corrupt, secretive exercise by political insiders.” Cohn traces the fraught development of the Affordable Care Act, the controversy and compromises that led to its passage, and the continuing debate. Republican opposition, he asserts, began immediately after the law was signed on March 23, 2010, and became a rallying cry for Trump and his supporters. “At its core,” Cohn writes, “universal health care is all about common strength in common vulnerability. It’s a recognition that anybody can get sick or injured—that, by pooling resources together, everybody will be safe. It’s the same exact concept as Social Security and Medicare, and why the party responsible for them has spent nearly a century trying to extend health care guarantees to the rest of the population.”
A timely contribution to the literature on an urgent issue.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-27093-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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