It helps to have both a scorecard and an economics degree to follow some of the thornier arguments on debt structure and...
A Greek economist-turned-politician looks at the neoliberal forces arrayed against the developing world, from the central banks to the European Union.
“Greeks did splendidly when we lived austere lives, when we spent less than we earned, when we channeled [sic] our savings to the education of our children,” said incoming finance minister Varoufakis (Economics/Univ. of Athens; And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future, 2016, etc.) on the surprise victory of the leftist Syriza Party in the spring of 2015, in a time when it seemed that Greece was on the verge of leaving the EU. The sentiments were conservative—until, that is, the author went on to say that austerity is one thing, while “Ponzi austerity” is quite another, and that his government had no intention of giving the country’s oligarchs and wealthy tax evaders a free ride on the backs of the Greek people. Public austerity imposed by the World Bank and other outside institutions in order to prevent the Greek economy from failing, he argued, was destroying private parsimony, and off he went to Brussels and Berlin to argue a kind of neo-Keynesian case before the country’s key creditors. He received little sympathy from the likes of Merkel, Macron, and America, though privately, officials told him that the demands for austerity were unreasonable and doomed to fail. Indeed, although President Barack Obama had said “you cannot keep on squeezing countries that are in the midst of depression,” U.S. Treasury actively opposed Greek efforts to set their own house in order. The story is a tangled one full of many threads both political and economic—and even historical, since Varoufakis traces some contemporary domestic issues to the dawn of the Cold War and a Greece torn between East and West.
It helps to have both a scorecard and an economics degree to follow some of the thornier arguments on debt structure and liability management, but this is an eye-opening look at the recent economic crisis in the eurozone.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-10100-8
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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