A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story.
A British historian looks deeply into the lost past of the peasantry, people who “hope for the future but do not forget the past.”
For most of history, Joyce writes, most people belonged to the peasantry, the class of people who made their living from the land. They were concentrated in scattered villages that favored something approaching democratic rule, even in the face of larger, more autocratic systems. The author focuses on Ireland, Poland, and southern Italy, but he also ranges widely. One surprise is how rapidly peasant communities have declined as agriculture has become less central to national and international economies. The famed English village of Akenfield, for example, the subject of a canonical book of rural sociology, has largely been gentrified and its past commodified, although the village does have “some Polish immigrant workers, people now more likely to have been peasants than anyone in the place.” Across the narrow sea, “rural Ireland has receded from people’s daily awareness,” with farmland now retired for leisure and tourism. Even the Mezzogiorno of Italy, considered “among the most ‘backward’ [areas] in Europe,” has become relatively wealthy. Joyce lauds many of the habits of agricultural peoples, including economic awareness, adaptability, and generosity. For example, he notes, in rural communities, money was loaned without interest, which by definition separated peasants from capitalists; politics tended to be decentralized, resistant to central authority, and bent in many cases toward anarchism (“not surprisingly, given peasant distrust of the state”); and religious belief preserved archaic and even pre-Christian beliefs while being being marked by “its lack of dogma, its indifference to theology, its human-centered God.” Why remember these peasants? As Joyce replies resoundingly, “We have a debt to those forgotten by history”: a debt that this elegantly written book seeks to repay.
A first-class work combining social history and ethnohistory with an unerring sense for a good story.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781668031087
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.
Another chapter in a long fight against inequality.
Building on his Fighting Oligarchy tour, which this year drew 280,000 people to rallies in red and blue states, Sanders amplifies his enduring campaign for economic fairness. The Vermont senator offers well-timed advice for combating corruption and issues a robust plea for national soul-searching. His argument rests on alarming data on the widening wealth gap’s impact on democracy. Bolstered by a 2010 Supreme Court decision that removed campaign finance limits, “100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion” on 2024 elections. Sanders focuses on the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, describing their enactment of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” with its $1 trillion in tax breaks for the richest Americans and big social safety net cuts, as the “largest transfer of wealth” in living memory. But as is his custom, he spreads the blame, dinging Democrats for courting wealthy donors while ignoring the “needs and suffering” of the working class. “Trump filled the political vacuum that the Democrats created,” he writes, a resonant diagnosis. Urging readers not to surrender to despair, Sanders offers numerous legislative proposals. These would empower labor unions, cut the workweek to 32 hours, regulate campaign spending, reduce gerrymandering, and automatically register 18-year-olds to vote. Grassroots supporters can help by running for local office, volunteering with a campaign, and asking educators how to help support public schools. Meanwhile, Sanders asks us “to question the fundamental moral values that underlie” a system that enables “the top 1 percent” to “own more wealth than the bottom 93 percent.” Though his prose sometimes reads like a transcribed speech with built-in applause lines, Sanders’ ideas are specific, clear, and commonsensical. And because it echoes previous statements, his call for collective introspection lands as genuine.
A powerful reiteration of principles—and some fresh ideas—from the longest-serving independent in congressional history.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9798217089161
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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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