A broadly sweeping philosophical analysis, Sowell's new book performs a useful service for people interested in contemporary politics: it attempts to lay out objectively the basic differences between the liberal and conservative visions. Sometimes cogent, the book falls short, however, of objectivity; its conservative biases and obfuscations are readily apparent from the start. According to Sowell, conservatives hold a "constrained" vision. They believe that evolved systemic processes—traditions, free competitive markets, languages, and laws—are essentially sound and that, if left alone, function in unintended and overlapping ways for the best; that self-interest and evil are inherent in the human condition and can only be contained, not removed; that injustices are acceptable trade-offs for the good flowing from the system; and that inarticulate human experience is superior to articulated rationality. Basically democratic, constrainers argue that power must be decentralized and that intellectuals are dangerous. The liberal perspective, or the "unconstrained" vision, presents the opposite picture: the system is flawed; intellectuals must intervene in behalf of the people, who are basically good but not as "good" as the elite; justice and equality can be artifically determined; and articulated rationality is superior to inarticulate human experience. Unconstrainers, therefore, are undemocratic, contemptuous of the people, and power centralizers. Sowell's analysis of liberalism is often persuasive, but his depiction of the "systemic processes" is sometimes vague and abstract. It is not always clear what is or has been systematic. Slavery? Racism? Consumer values, which have become systemic but undermine older traditions? More important, like most conservatives, Sowell lets corporate capitalism off the hook, a capitalism that has had great discretionary power, determining prices and wages in centralized ways, undermining what Sowell calls the "free competitive market." Moreover, this capitalism has probably done more than anything else to destroy other features of the systemic process—family traditions and cultural values—a contention democratic leftists make today but which Sowell ignores.
Pub Date: Jan. 15, 1986
ISBN: 0465002056
Page Count: 345
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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