Sowell (A Conflict of Visions, 1986, etc.), the controversial economist from the Hoover Institution, now examines and indicts affirmative action on a worldwide basis. Sowell begins by weighing the preferential policies that majorities have instituted for themselves. In Malaya under the British, for example, the politically dominant Malays received free education while the minority Chinese had to develop and pay for their own. The result, not unexpected to the author, was a greater number of Chinese college graduates—particularly in the hard fields of science and mathematics—than Malays. In today's world, however, most preferential policies exist for the betterment of previously disadvantaged segments of society: blacks and other minorities in the US; the lower castes in India; Maoris in New Zealand. Although most of these policies had clearly established cutoff dates, none has ever been abrogated. When Pakistan was created, for example, an affirmative-action program was begun for the East Bengalis. Although the Bengalis have long since established their own country, the program continues unabated in Pakistan. Aside from their continuity, Sowell finds, preference policies for both majorities and minorities have in common an inability to work. He cites statistics showing how it is the elite of the minorities, those people who need it the least, who benefit the most. He dwells on India because India has the longest history of preferential policies (begun under the British); has experienced the most polarization because of it; and has suffered the most violence from it. Sowell warns of increasing polarization in all countries if present trends continue, repeating how little we truly know of the causes of poverty, and stressing the need for examining results of programs rather than their motivations. Perhaps not the last word on affirmative action, but valuable in pointing out how empirically unproven much of the current thought on that issue is.
Pub Date: June 27, 1990
ISBN: 0688109691
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1990
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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
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