A superb resource for boomers dealing with their parents’ final days and anxious to exert more control over their own rites...
An impassioned appeal for a kinder, gentler death.
George Polk Award–winner Kiernan, a reporter for the Burlington Free Press (Vermont), argues that last-ditch efforts to prolong life are leading causes of bankruptcy that also deprive the dying and their families of their dignity and peace of mind. He cautions that medical directives, which many assume will protect them from unwanted interventions, are routinely ignored by hospitals. Further, those who seek refuge in a hospice may be left out in the cold: A physician must attest that a candidate has six months to live, yet doctors are notoriously bad at estimating endpoints. Fewer Americans die of sudden illnesses or accidents, Kiernan notes. The majority linger with chronic illnesses like Alzheimer’s or cancer, yet our medical system isn’t equipped to handle those whose prognosis falls somewhere between “really sick” and “almost gone,” nor to deal with their families, whose primary need may be respite care. The author sees some progress as hospitals begin to offer palliative measures designed to make final days more comfortable. He considers the benefits of a gradual death, which include greater intimacy with family members and time to plan for a conscious ending or to sum up a life. Kiernan tells how he and his siblings dealt with their mother’s inoperable cancer, then turns the lessons they learned into a well-considered prescription for the entire population. He urges patients to fight for their right to die naturally; medical schools to devote more attention in their curriculum to the dying process; and policymakers to start making it easier for dying patients to receive adequate pain control. Gripping first-person stories and interviews with exceptional caregivers make the human case for national reform.
A superb resource for boomers dealing with their parents’ final days and anxious to exert more control over their own rites of passage, as well as for health-care professionals who need to hear this story from the other side.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34224-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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
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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