Valuable reading for policymakers.
An economist and expert on the world’s poorest populations analyzes who migrates, why and the effects on host societies.
Collier (Economics/Univ. of Oxford; The Plundered Planet: Why We Must—and How We Can—Manage Nature for Global Prosperity, 2010, etc.) considers migration from poor to rich nations and what immigration policies are most appropriate. Eschewing the emotional responses often associated with his topic, he insists that “Is migration good or bad?” is the wrong question. Rather, he focuses on how much is best, hoping that his evidence-based study will help governments manage the flow. “[H]igh emotion and little knowledge” have created huge differences in migration policies (Japan is closed to immigrants), with most officials making value- rather than evidence-based judgments. Collier writes at length about the critical roles of diasporas, which make the cost of migration fall and provide much-needed help to the newly arrived. As diasporas grow (chiefly in big cities, in the United States and elsewhere), more migrants are likely to come, and fewer are absorbed into mainstream society. He notes that migrants are winners in the process. Mostly young, able to afford the high costs of migration and willing to take the risks, they tend to succeed. They do not compete closely with indigenous workers, writes Collier, but their earnings are driven down by the arrival of additional immigrants. The biggest losers are the people left behind in poor, mainly African nations, which lose their brightest and most talented, gaining somewhat from remittances. In all, migration does not have significantly adverse effects on host societies, writes the author, but nations must set ceilings on the sizes of diasporas. That way, migration will achieve a sustainable rate and not accelerate to a point where it becomes damaging.
Valuable reading for policymakers.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-539865-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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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