The authors are necessarily forceful, and they offer a well-written must-read for those ready to give up hope about politics...
An examination of how “the rapid proliferation of a system akin to oligarchy—within our own country—threatens to cripple our march forward.”
Center for Public Integrity senior analyst Potter (Obamacare? What’s in It for Me, 2013, etc.) and Issue One executive director Penniman cite historical and current incidents of America’s “coin-operated government” and its outsized influence on legislation. Money dominates the political system as it muzzles more Americans than it empowers. The authors especially point to the election of 1896, in which businessman Marcus Hanna bankrolled William McKinley’s campaign “almost entirely with his own money.” That election recorded, as a percentage of GDP, the largest spending levels ever, before or since. With a ray of hope, the authors point out that Theodore Roosevelt’s administration turned the tables on corporate spending. Later, the Tillman Act of 1907 and the Hatch Act of 1939 tried to limit campaign activity and contributions. The Taft Hartley Act of 1943 banned direct spending by unions and corporations, which led to the creation of the first PACs. The authors pull no punches regarding the “corrupting influence” of the Citizens United decision, and they succinctly and clearly expose the direct influence of lobbyists for such industries as banking, mortgages, oil and other fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, coal, and even food and beverages. Lobbyists demand self-regulation, threaten job losses if they have too many rules, and encourage delaying tactics in Congress. Thankfully, Potter and Penniman offer practical answers and point out that reform beginning at the local level is most effective and that “sunlight is the baseline for all reform.” As they note, the underfunded and dysfunctional Federal Election Commission, the IRS, the president, and the Securities and Exchange Commission all have tools to help, but they have to use them.
The authors are necessarily forceful, and they offer a well-written must-read for those ready to give up hope about politics and government in the United States.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-109-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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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