Slender but forceful.
Three passionate lectures about the state of politics in Israel.
In this rumination about the country he loves and whose policies make him ashamed, novelist and peace activist Oz (Judas, 2016, etc.) sounds humorous, mournful, enraged, and uplifting. In the title essay, “Dear Zealots,” the author argues, noncontroversially, that zealotry can be found among all peoples, places, and religions. Oz particularly bemoans not only Islamic fanaticism, but Jewish fanaticism. In one of the book’s sharpest insights, he suggests that Jewish-Israeli fanaticism is increasing in part because while the Holocaust and Stalinism seemed to have infused people, for a few decades, with a fear of extremism, that “gift” is fading as the years pass. The second piece locates the “heart of Judaism” in the call to protect, and demand justice for, the weak and the oppressed. Oz argues that Israel is moving further away from that heart and that the left has too readily accepted the idea that real Judaism is the possession of the ultra-Orthodox or the settlers, not of the justice-seeking secularists. In one of the book’s most memorable lines, which could serve as a fitting slogan for the Zionist left and its allies around the world, the author declares, “what occurs inside the borders is exponentially more important than what their outline should be.” In the final essay, Oz urges a two-state solution, the national equivalent, writes the author, of a duplex. If that doesn’t happen soon, there will be “an Arab state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan” preceded by “a racist regime” of “fanatic Jews” trying to prevent said Arab state and possibly by a bloodbath. It’s a pessimistic prophecy, but Oz maintains there’s rarely been a better moment to make peace than now. And while a peace treaty won’t make everything perfect, without one, “things will be worse.”
Slender but forceful.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-98700-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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