A sober, refreshingly nonpartisan discussion of the place of unions in the modern economy.
An analytical appraisal of the state of unions in the United States, including a detailed history of their rise, evolution and eventual decline.
Tull is a lifelong union man who’s now the retired president of a unionized construction company; he also has a doctorate in business administration, with a specialization in labor relations. His debut is both a history and a diagnosis, chronicling the development of unions in the United States as well as dissecting the contemporary diminishment of their power. When unions first emerged as a response to an economy radically transformed by the Industrial Revolution, they were hailed as instruments of worker protection and social progress, supported by both political parties. However, they also cultivated public suspicion and were often seen as self-interested cabals of greed, communist sympathizers and opponents of free trade. Today, unions suffer from steadily declining membership; increases in low-skilled, immigrant labor; the staunch opposition of the Republican Party; and a massively shifting economy. Tull provides a comprehensive overview, detailing major victories such as President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 executive order certifying collective bargaining as a legal right and defeats such as President Ronald Reagan’s rough treatment of striking air-traffic controllers in 1981. The work touches upon several current controversies with delicacy and aplomb, such as the legality of the “card check” method of labor organizing, the prevalence of right-to-work laws and the productivity of strikes. He also discusses, with unusual candor, the important distinction between public and private unions, acknowledging the excesses of the former. Although he’s a committed union supporter, his evenhanded treatment of the issues is admirable. For example, during a discussion of charter schools, one of the highlights of the book, he bluntly criticizes teacher unions: “If the teachers’ unions are not willing to relax their unreasonable demands, they will find themselves continuing to lose membership.” In the final analysis, Tull argues that even Democratic Party dominance of Congress and the executive branch wouldn’t be enough to revitalize unions in the United States: They’ll need a thoroughgoing self-reinvention to become relevant again.
A sober, refreshingly nonpartisan discussion of the place of unions in the modern economy.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490552767
Page Count: 222
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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