Sunstein’s firsthand knowledge and distinct humor give his account a real dynamism.
Obama’s former “regulatory czar” examines the reforms that are beginning to transform the government and what they portend for the future.
In 2009, Harvard Law School professor Sunstein (A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesn't Mean What It Meant Before, 2009, etc.) became administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, “the cockpit of the regulatory state,” where he worked for the next three years. Sunstein was present during the first Reagan administration, when the office was established and its purposes defined. He writes about using the office to find ways to save lives and money and attempt to improve the quality of life. Sunstein is a partisan of behavioral economics and uses its methods in what he calls “nudges…approaches that influence decisions while preserving freedom of choice.” His mission, he writes, has been largely one of simplification: “fewer rules and more common sense.” Disclosure, whether in summary or fuller form, helps the process along, as does involvement of the public. For example, changes to the presentation of automobile fuel economy make the costs clearer over time, and the presentation of daily food requirements through the image of a plate, rather than a pyramid, makes for better understanding. Sunstein is a vigorous defender of the methods of cost-benefit analysis, both to determine what the costs really are and to figure out whether proposed changes or improvements will bring about net benefits. He has interesting insights about features of current partisan conflicts and the contradictory positions protagonists can find themselves in.
Sunstein’s firsthand knowledge and distinct humor give his account a real dynamism.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2659-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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