Alternating spoonfuls of treacle and wormwood.
Wall Street Journal columnist and eloquent Republican apologist Noonan (Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, 1994, etc.) reprints pieces that ran weekly in the year following 9/11.
There is nothing new in Noonan. Her universe is as uncomplicated as a Saturday morning Western serial from a half-century ago. There are the good guys (all Republicans), the better guys (Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes, Rudy Giuliani), and the best guy (the pope). There are the bad guys (Democrats and liberals), the worse guys (Al Gore and Joe Lieberman), and the worst guy (Bill Clinton). She says Reagan is like a battleship, Clinton like a collapsed accordion. (The latter is also a lazy slob.) George W. Bush is like Truman: decisive, steadfast, diligent, tongue-tied but trustworthy, the real thing in a faux world, a guy who found his soul in the ashes of 9/11. And so on. The author justly—and repeatedly—celebrates the heroism of the emergency workers on that awful day but then indulges in some silly sentimentality about how great it would be to have more retro-males with big muscles and soft hearts who stand to surrender their subway seats to women. She waxes nostalgic for the pervasive patriotism of a century ago but neglects to mention that in those wonderful times her grandmother would not have been allowed to vote, nor would anyone else who failed the tests of gender and race. Oh, but weren’t they the good old days! Noonan rages justifiably against the failures of the American Catholic church in the sex scandals and honors the pope with lovely lines and even a few of her tears. She saw the actual face of Satan in the explosion at Tower Two and writes credulously about a statue of Mary weeping blood. She says we must credit Reagan for the booming ’90s economy, Clinton for 9/11. Corporate greed is bad. Profiling is good.
Alternating spoonfuls of treacle and wormwood.Pub Date: June 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-5005-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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