While the book is somewhat of a structural patchwork, the concept of O’Sullivan’s Levelling presentation is fresh and...
A gloomy report on the end of globalization featuring a unique thesis that harkens back to 17th-century England.
O’Sullivan, the chief investment officer in the international wealth management division at Credit Suisse, first imparts a wealth of historical information to explain how the current sense of a “world turned upside down” is actually a transition phase not unlike the tail end of the previous period of global growth that occurred just before World War I. Globalization, in short, is defunct, and following a huge expansion in world markets, trade, and financial institutions, it is all coming apart—as in the early decades of the previous century—due to protectionism, tariffs, rise in poverty, debt, ill-health, unemployment, inequality, protest voting, and right-wing policies. The author begins his study with the depressing state of current affairs and then addresses the challenge of “darker scenarios that threaten the world we live in.” He delineates a fascinating grassroots movement that erupted during the throes of the English civil war, one that might lend practical solutions for today. The Levellers emerged as a democratic faction of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, a “mongrel” group of regular people, soldiers, and tradespeople, both men and women, as opposed to the “Grandees” who held the power in Parliament. Over the course of several so-called Putney Debates in St. Mary’s Church in London in the 1640s, they laid out a case for “repairing the broken contract of trust between elected representatives and their electorates,” pleading for equality, accountability, responsibility, and transparency in government, along with unfettered trade and debt relief. The ramifications of the Levellers’ demands later appeared in the revolutionary constitutions of America and France, and O’Sullivan also examines what Alexander Hamilton might have suggested as a solution for our current mess. With a generous nod to the work of previous authors and experts, the author offers a solid synthesis of prognosis and practical solutions.
While the book is somewhat of a structural patchwork, the concept of O’Sullivan’s Levelling presentation is fresh and thought-provoking.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5417-2406-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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