Opportunistic, to be sure, but the authors provide plenty to revel in if you haven’t been keeping up with 10 years of freaky...
The Freakonomics guys return with another kooky and counterintuitive compilation of economic analysis that might appear wildly offbeat but just might be surprisingly spot-on.
It’s been a decade since Levitt and Dubner (Think Like a Freak: The Authors of Freakonomics Offer to Retrain Your Brain, 2014, etc.) first set the thinking world on end with their provocative investigations into the economics of everyday things. In the intervening years, the uncompromising writers have kept their freak flag flying, penning a series of equally challenging blog posts further aimed at discovering the hidden underpinnings of society. Here, the authors bring together a selection of those posts. The format, however, doesn’t always serve the contents. Careening from the oil apocalypse to the benefits of cheating in sports is lots of fun, but the ride can be jarring without a contemplative break in between. In their original form, Levitt and Dubner’s blog posts went off like tiny literary land mines. But they allowed time to think and regroup. Here, they often leave readers feeling like they’re being repeatedly subjected to a series of head-snapping hit-and-runs. Wait. We should allow folks to vote as many times as they like in elections as long as they pay for it? What? Levitt and Dubner’s latest foray is much more successful when it reflects the lively online interactions 10 years of blogging have brought them—e.g., the time they sought out the best aptonyms on the planet and found a dentist named “Chip Silvertooth” and an undertaker named “Eikenberry.” Equally pleasing is their account of the episode in which the Internet deftly managed to turn the tables on the supersavvy economists when they attempted to find and congratulate their 400,000th Twitter follower.
Opportunistic, to be sure, but the authors provide plenty to revel in if you haven’t been keeping up with 10 years of freaky blog posts.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-238532-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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
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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