A nuanced argument of interest to those who worry that nuanced arguments are no longer possible in quad or classroom.
A rousing call for speech on college campuses that is truly free, addressing uncomfortable issues while allowing room for dissent.
The habit of thinking clearly about big-picture issues of politics, philosophy, ethics, identity, and other realms, the very stuff of liberal discourse, is “virtually impossible for a great many people in academic life.” So writes Salmagundi editor Boyers (English/Skidmore Coll.; The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals, 2015, etc.) in this bracing—and, at turns, eminently arguable—defense of norms of free inquiry against aggrieved identity politics. He’s pretty woke, a student told him, for “an old white guy like you.” Old white guys have feelings, too—and histories that embrace centuries of struggle and survival that don’t often figure in the modern narrative. Boyers begins by examining the modern notion of privilege, recalling what would probably have been an actionable case today of one of his own professors who advised him to lose his Brooklyn accent lest he not be taken seriously. Privilege, as in white privilege, is a real thing, at least of a kind, he allows: That professor would be hauled up today for classism and put through sensitivity training, but the very idea of white privilege is now a “formula resistant to meaningful conversations, which fuels insupportable assumptions and resentments.” Boyers cites cases: a student who cannot believe that Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer, can speak with any authority of the lives of black South Africans; the novelist Viet Tranh Nguyen, whose article on the supposed hostility of writers’ workshops to people of color rouses Boyers’ vigorous objections. Coming from a clearly liberal point of view, Boyers nonetheless courts controversy—and is bound to get it—with some of his tenets, such as the thought that identity politics as such evinces “a fear of the uncertainties and hard choices that come with modernity and the need to think.”
A nuanced argument of interest to those who worry that nuanced arguments are no longer possible in quad or classroom.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982127-18-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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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