A provocative pulse-reading, the answer to whose title is probably yes—but at what cost?
Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post economics journalist Pearlstein examines our dominant economic system and finds it sorely wanting.
It is a foundational myth that anyone with a good idea and a strong will can make it in America, that one generation will do better than the next. If that were ever true, writes the author, then it is true no longer, not given the evolution of our peculiar form of capitalism with American characteristics, a spectacularly dog-eat-dog system. “The only thing exceptional about America,” he writes, “is that it is now less mobile than many other societies with long histories of rigid social and class structures.” Thomas Piketty has already told us as much, but not in prose so crisp and accessible. Pearlstein traces that evolution to the convergence of three related axioms 30-odd years ago: the notion that government is the problem and not the solution; that corporations have no responsibility other than increasing their shareholders’ wealth; and that morality doesn’t really enter into questions of the purse, “no matter how unequal the distribution of income and wealth might become.” These three ideas have yielded a scenario in which Republicans are now abandoning long-nurtured ideals of a balanced budget and investment in public goods in favor of a no-tax, laissez-faire economics in which the big ones eat the little ones. Pearlstein explodes supply-side assumptions, showing that present inequalities are yielding stagnation—why work when you can’t get ahead, as is the case for most workers today? Instead, he notes, studies have shown that the most productive economy balances egalitarian and meritocratic reward systems: Everyone shares to some extent, with incentives for those who do more. The author closes by proposing numerous systemic reforms, including profit-sharing, renewed antitrust legislation and enforcement, and limiting special-interest money in politics, all with an eye to "replenishing our stock of social capital.”
A provocative pulse-reading, the answer to whose title is probably yes—but at what cost?Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-18598-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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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