An affably contrarian reading of the Constitution that merits attention.
A learned interpretation of the Constitution as a document that creates unity as much as political structures.
Several recent books have held the Constitution to be a fundamentally flawed document, enshrining legal protections for the benefit of the slave states. Levin, author of The Fractured Republic, writes instead that the Constitution, read generously, affords a solution to reigning schisms: “It was designed with an exceptionally sophisticated grasp of the nature of political division and diversity, and it aims to create—and not just to occupy—common ground in our society.” Thus, the Constitution is not merely a legal framework but also the scaffolding for solidarity. Levin examines the Constitution along a “five-part framework,” four related to government and the fifth devoted to “union and unity.” The five are interrelated if sometimes in uneasy relationship to one another. For example, the constitutional mechanisms guaranteeing the rights of minorities against the tyranny of the majority enable such encumbering antiquities as the Electoral College. “Simple majoritarianism is of no use when there aren’t simple majorities,” writes the author, arguing that the net effect of these tensions is to require contending bodies to “act together when they don’t think alike…making civic unity more achievable.” Levin takes a prescriptive turn later in his discussion, suggesting that there are ways to improve a bogged-down legislature to return to the Constitution’s better angels. Congress is too much in the hands of party leaders who give junior members too little to do, which, the author writes, might be solved by giving congressional committees more power—especially those that concern the budget, which would foster bipartisan action and “depolarize spending debates a little.” Otherwise, Levin holds, parties will respond only to their bases and ignore the vast center—i.e., about what we have today.
An affably contrarian reading of the Constitution that merits attention.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780465040742
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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