by Morris V Franco ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2014
An uneven book, but one that presents a well-reasoned introduction to the national debt and the problems it poses to the...
A call to action regarding the United States’ mounting national debt, as well as a general manifesto of conservative principles.
Franco, a veteran of the Air Force and a retired credit analyst, tackles the worrisome issue of national debt in his debut. With the debt on track to top $20 trillion by 2017, the author predicts that the annual interest alone, approximately $1 trillion, will be enough to strangle the economy. Indeed, Franco’s focus on the pernicious effects of interest is what distinguishes this analysis from the many other books devoted to the debt. He concedes that the 2008 Federal Reserve bond-buying program, which manufactured lower interest rates, successfully stimulated commerce and arrested a recession. However, he says that very same program will inevitably saddle the Fed with massive losses when it’s forced to unload bonds at a loss. Also, as interest rates inevitably rise, the national debt will become insurmountable, he asserts. Ultimately, Franco’s prognosis is dark, foreseeing sovereign default, the implosion of the Fed, and irreversible economic decline. The first 118 pages are entirely devoted to discussion of the debt, but then the book goes further afield, touching upon a broad spectrum of issues that include Israel, voter identification, the death penalty, abortion, the defects of the English language, and the “lunacy” of mental illness as a legal defense, to list only a few. The heart of the book is characterized by meticulous rigor, but these later sections seem more like digressive, unnecessary asides. That said, although the book’s economic predictions are dreary, readers are spared any hectoring. In fact, the tone is often surprisingly light, even when delivering the grimmest news: “Try to visualize the disaster facing our country if our government takes no action on the debt crisis, and this scenario plays out continuously for another twenty-one years, through 2043. Ugh!”
An uneven book, but one that presents a well-reasoned introduction to the national debt and the problems it poses to the country’s future fiscal health.Pub Date: July 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1495326776
Page Count: 180
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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