A bracing attack on sanitized and tendentious misperceptions of Dr. Martin Luther King. Dyson (Race Rules, 1996, etc.), who contends that Dr. King is arguably “the greatest American who ever lived,” seeks to “rescue King from his admirers and deliver him from his foes.” Both black and white progressives and forces on the right, he contends, have tried to hijack the figure of King for their own purposes. Ralph Reed has used King as an example of racial reconciliation and of religion fused with politics in order to woo minorities to the religious right. Although whites have embraced King’s “I have a dream— speech for its safely universal appeal, King was anything but the “poster boy for Safe Negro Leadership.— In fact, Dyson points out, King embraced democratic socialism rather than capitalism, favored income redistribution, called the US a racist country, and believed American society needed fundamental transformation. Dyson details King’s views on war—particularly his attitude to the Vietnam War, which he opposed not only because of his beliefs in non-violence, but also because it was racist as black soldiers were sent to fight in “extraordinary proportion to the rest of the population.” Elsewhere Dyson describes King’s move from fighting racism to opposing class oppression. Dismissing the claims by militant blacks that King was an “Uncle Tom,— Dyson maintains that he was a black nationalist who supported some degree of separation, even in the schools, in order to help blacks advance. Dyson rounds off his portrait by dealing with the charges of plagiarism against King, his relations with women, his family’s highhanded control of his legacy, and parallels between Hip Hop lyrics and King’s message. Despite often prolix prose, Dyson succeeds in recasting King’s message from a comfortingly unexamined myth to an enduring challenge by a great American provocateur. (Author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86776-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
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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