An impassioned indictment of a broken system and its enablers and necessary reading as the pandemic intensifies.
The award-winning Yale historian launches a broadside against the American health care system.
“The day that had just begun, December 29, 2019, could have been my last.” So writes Snyder about his hospitalization and subsequent poor treatment over the next few months, experiences that left him enraged at the state of health care in America. “In five hospitals over three months,” the author found himself with a front-row seat to the beginnings of the coronavirus pandemic. He took detailed notes during his time as a patient, and he clearly shows a health care system far more interested in profits than health, a system that follows the dictates of computers and algorithms rather than any one-to-one relationship between doctor and patient. Snyder delivers a scathing critique of this “grotesque” and “ludicrous” system as well as a government response to the pandemic that he dismisses as “magical thinking.” Indeed, the Trump administration’s “unwillingness to test did not mean that we were healthy, only that we were ignorant,” and the “focus on a foreign source of ‘fault’ meant that no one here was to blame. When no one bears responsibility, no one has to do anything.” The author meticulously documents the health problems he suffered—among many others, a burst appendix, tremors, and “an abscess the size of a baseball in my liver”—seemingly all of which were ignored or misdiagnosed by doctors. Snyder compares the impersonalized, economy-driven care he received in American hospitals with the far more nurturing treatment he and his wife had experienced during a childbirth in Austria, a procedure that was both “intimate and inexpensive.” Ultimately, writes the author, “our botching of a pandemic is the latest symptom of our malady, of a politics that deals out pain and death rather than security and health, profit for a few rather than prosperity for the many.”
An impassioned indictment of a broken system and its enablers and necessary reading as the pandemic intensifies.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-23889-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
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
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