Compelling arguments against ideologues bent on dismantling the government.
Deep state, shmeep state: a spirited rebuttal to the canard that federal civil servants are nest-featherers up to no good.
“The fact is that federal employees go to work every day with the explicit job description of making the lives of everyday Americans better.” So writes W. Kamau Bell, one of the writers drawn into this Washington Post project to explore the federal workforce and the things its members do in their daily labors. As volume editor Lewis notes, the Post series, although about eight times larger than the usual feature, saw a fourfold increase in readership—perhaps not so surprising, given that D.C. is a company town, but noteworthy in that the series painstakingly showed readers the myriad ways in which government is not the demonized bugaboo of Reagan and Trump supporters. What do the people of the Department of Agriculture do? Lewis asks and answers: “They preserve rural America from extinction, among other things.” Lewis, best known for his 2003 book Moneyball, profiles a mine inspector at the Department of Labor who, committed to making mining safer, developed protocols and technologies such as the “stability factor” to do just that, even though “industry executives…made it clear…that they viewed safety as a subject for wimps and losers.” The National Cemetery Administration, writes Casey Cep, may be unknown, but its 2,300-odd employees “bury more than 140,000 veterans and their family members each year” while tending the graves of more than 4 million veterans. Dave Eggers visits the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is quietly asking questions about life in the universe, sending out spacecraft and monitoring the heavens while employing some of the best minds in the world—about a third of them women. All the contributions similarly press the point that the government’s work is useful—and no one else but government workers are likely to do it.
Compelling arguments against ideologues bent on dismantling the government.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9798217047802
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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
PERSPECTIVES
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