A broad-ranging, provocative examination of a problem that is likely only to grow.
An award-winning Spanish novelist and journalist chronicles his travels around the world revealing our collective inability to “provide millions of people with enough food to…live healthfully.”
“There is no plague as lethal, and at the same time as avoidable, as hunger.” So writes Caparrós (Professor-at-Large/Cornell Univ.; Valfierno: The Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa, 2008, etc.), asserting that as many as 800 million people experience life-threatening hunger every day. Sometimes this hunger is due to famine, which, he writes, can be justified, so to speak, by the fact that its cause is often war or an accident of weather; more often it can be traced to the whims of bureaucracy and “the banality of evil.” Whatever the cause, by his estimate, five children die every minute around the world from hunger. Caparrós describes his travels to Argentina, Niger, India, and the U.S. to examine food insecurity, famine, agricultural inefficiencies, climate change, and the like. The author concludes that hunger is a product not of biology but of economics. In a time of great inequality, the haves owe their fortunes to the fact that there are so many have-nots, and “the capitalist machine doesn’t know what to do with hundreds of millions of people” it considers to be “surplus.” The capitalist critique is well considered if sometimes diffuse. The author’s argument takes on greater force when he works with the data to make significant points, such as the fact that Argentina, which produces enough export crops such as soybeans and maize to feed 300 million people, still cannot manage to take care of its own precisely because its resources are flowing outward. “How is there not enough?” he asks, answering his own question by placing the Argentine example in the context of the globalized commodity system. In that context, even as Argentina has managed to replace its rural laborers with machines, “it hasn’t figured out what to do with those people." Thus, they starve.
A broad-ranging, provocative examination of a problem that is likely only to grow.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61219-804-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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
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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