A popular treatment of the emergence of political economics, as well as a discussion of the major unresolved issues still on the table today, such as the role of government in managing society versus the efficacy of the free market.
Nasar (Journalism/Columbia Graduate School; A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., 1998) begins her examination of the evolution of modern society, and the attempt by leading intellectuals to understand and shape the process, with a look at the Victorian era and the writings of Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Malthus and others. This was a time when the question of how to improve the deplorable condition of the British working classes—illustrated by writers such as Charles Dickens, whom Nasar cites—was hotly debated, with Malthus blaming the depravity of the poor and Marx predicting revolution. The author references the less well-known but influential work of economist Alfred Marshall, a champion of universal education and technology who argued against the notion that philanthropy and political economy were at odds and that progress was not possible without revolution. Nasar acknowledges the Fabian society as the first think tank, although the word “connot[ing] the growing role of the expert to public policy making wasn't coined until World War II.” At the turn of the century, it was influential in shaping public policy in the direction of social reform, attracting such notables as Winston Churchill, then a liberal, to its ranks. Nasar gives a gripping account of the devastation in Europe after World War I, and the conflict since over how to resolve cyclical economic crises such as the depression of the 1930s and the current recession. This broad-sweep introduction adds an important historical dimension to current debates on the future of the American economy.
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-684-87298-8
Page Count: 554
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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