A contentious, stimulating riposte to liberal orthodoxy.
Lyons’ political treatise asserts that growing federal power and bureaucracy have undermined the Constitution, social cohesion, and individual liberty.
The author, an award-winning poet and third-generation printer, follows up The DNA of Democracy (2019) with this study of the inexorable transformation of the U.S. government over the past century—from an institution with limited power and respect for free markets and individual rights into an overweening “Administrative State.” The rot set in, he argues, under President Woodrow Wilson, whom he characterizes as believing the government should have unlimited power to shape society and control citizens; the 16th Amendment, which instituted a federal income tax, empowered that agenda by giving Washington vast financial clout, says the author. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal championed newly minted economic rights, he contends, while violating natural rights articulated in the Declaration of Independence, and further inflated the “Administrative State”by hatching federal agencies that heavily regulated the economy. Lyons praises Eisenhower’s interstate highway program but condemns Richard Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan for increasing “government dependence” and urban-renewal schemes for bulldozing thriving, predominantly Black city neighborhoods. The author continues on to latter-day alleged federal overreaches, including President Barack Obama’s executive orders extending the Environmental Protection Agency’s power to regulate bodies of water and carbon dioxide emissions. Lyons’ manifesto is a rebuke to big government and a paean to conservative values of faith, religion, individualism, free enterprise, and loyalty to what he sees as the Framers’ constitutional vision. His dissections of political philosophy are cogent and discerning, and his analyses of concrete policies are well thought out, employing elegantly aphoristic prose: “The Great Society…replaced property with government rental housing; it took the natural neighborhood and replaced it with centrally planned projects…it took away the family and replaced it with bureaucrats and social workers.” Democrats, among others, will find much to disagree with here. However, Lyons does offer a thoughtful, if sharp-elbowed, conservative challenge to center-left narratives of progress.
A contentious, stimulating riposte to liberal orthodoxy.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9973462-9-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Lylea Creative Resources
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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