A powerful and well-reasoned call to action.
A clear argument that “confronting the full danger of nuclear and climate devastation enables us to sustain rather than destroy our species.”
Renowned psychiatrist Lifton (Witness to an Extreme Century, 2011, etc.), a winner of the National Book Award, explains his use of the term “swerve” to describe “a significant, if not always logical or clear, shift in the way people experience their world.” In this instance, the shift reflects the recognition of the dangers posed by global warming. The author is best known for his study of how decent people come to accept an apocalyptic view of the future and even condone atrocities such as the bombing of Hiroshima. He compares the attempt to normalize the use of nuclear weapons to the current claim that climate change is a hoax. “Like global warming,” writes Lifton, “those weapons raised doubts about the future of our species.” Failing to accept the reality of global warming, Donald Trump and his corporate backers continue to encourage the reckless consumption of fossil fuels. The author points out that nuclear radiation is also an environmental issue even though the threats posed by nuclear weapons and global warming are significantly different. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused sudden “unprecedented slaughter and suffering,” while the effects of climate change are incremental. However, in both instances, acceptance of existing political power structures has led to widespread failure to act in a timely fashion. The similarity between them is in the quality of the responses they evoke; they both reflect a dangerous human tendency to “suppress and distort our perceptions of their danger” by “normalizing” them. Lifton argues forcefully for a significant swerve in popular understanding of the catastrophic potential of global warming, and he cites the 1982 million-person anti–nuclear weapons march in New York City as an example of the level of response needed regarding climate change today.
A powerful and well-reasoned call to action.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62097-347-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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