Health, Education and Labor
Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine
Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer by Shannon Brownlee
Despite the bad press that the Veteran's Administration health care system has gotten lately, the author presents evidence that it delivers better, more efficient medical care than that which most Americans receive. Those getting VA care are less likely than others to be given unnecessary -- and often dangerous -- treatments and medicines. America must re-allocate its medical resources. Says Brownlee,
Hospitals, nurses, specialists, and all of the industries that produce medical goods have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo; they don't want to see health care shrink. Drug companies don't want doctors to write fewer prescriptions, and the latex glove manufacturers don't want cardiologists to perform fewer angioplasties. And nobody would want to put thousands of people who are currently employed by the health care industry out of a job, unless it was absolutely necessary. But it is necessary, because the alternative to rightsizing health care is worse.
Overtreated ... published September 18, 2007 by Bloomsbury USA
Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy by Richard Kahlenberg
By the end of his career, Albert Shanker had become one of America's most important education reformers, although getting there had at times been a very bumpy ride. This first full-length bio has been faulted for glossing a few (if definitely not all) of the more uncomfortable aspects of his life and times, but perhaps Shanker earned that much deference. He rose to prominence as an organizer for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), a New York City teacher's union that engaged in numerous unpopular but generally successful strikes during the 1960s and '70s. He served as the UFT's president from 1964-84, and as president of the national American Federation of Teachers from 1974-97. When A Nation at Risk was published in 1983, he was one of the few teachers' unionists who publicly conceded the report's ugly but inarguable realities, and who supported many of the reform proposals that emerged from the public debate that followed the controversial report.
Tough Liberal ... published August 16, 2007 by Columbia University Press
Stem Cell Wars: Inside Stories from the Frontlines by Eve Herold
The extreme Right derailed stem cell research in America in part by monopolizing the topic while most of us were still ignorant and silent about it. Even now, there simply aren't many worthwhile, general-audience volumes on stem cell technologies -- but there's plenty of anti-stem cell propaganda available, courtesy of primitivist "Christians." Thanks to veteran health and science writer Eve Herold, however, an acceptable primer's now on the shelves. A staffer at the Genetic Policy Institute, Herold explains the essentials of not only the science involved, but also the medical implications, politics, consequences for U.S. universities, and recent controversies such as that involving Korea's Hwang Woo-Suk. And she does so in terms in terms anyone can understand. But ultimately her book's about the human, personal costs of the Right's war on stem cell research. She cites many instances of needless pain, suffering and death that the Right's perpetuating on Americans whose illnesses might otherwise have one day been cured via stem cell technology.
Stem Cell Wars ... published September 19, 2006 by Palgrave Macmillan
The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges & Who Gets Left Outside the Gates by D. Golden
A Wall Street Journal reporter (previously with the Boston Globe), Golden won a Pulitzer Prize two years ago for his series on bribery-based admission policies at America's elite universities: a vital tool that America's kleptocracy uses to perpetuate itself. Now Golden delves deeper into that subject, using not only highly credible and voluminous research but also highly pertinent anecdotes to show that our nation's richest, most powerful residents are in effect stealing -- through bribery -- limited space at top schools that would otherwise have gone to our republic's most promising young people. How crass and extensive is the problem? In a recent interview Golden said,
If the parent pledges enough money or is a big enough celebrity or powerful enough alumnus, the break can amount to 300 SAT points out of 1600, which is as much or more than a typical affirmative-action preference would be. About a third of the kids at the typical élite university would probably not be there if not for those preferences.
The Price of Admission ... published September 5, 2006 by Crown
Unplugged: Reclaiming Our Right to Die in America by William H. Colby
The lawyer who represented Nancy Cruzan's family does an admirable job of shunning politics in this humane, intelligent, well-written book on end-of-life issues in America. Colby's only apparent agenda is one of urging his readers to clarify their views about such matters with their loved ones and to fill out a health care power of attorney. In the process, he does an excellent job of tracing the development of America's thinking (and not thinking) about right-to-die issues. Advances in medical technology, he shows, have made it difficult to agree even on what constitutes death. Feeding tubes, respirators, and various other technologies have created a world between living and dying. "We don't even have the words in our dictionaries top describe this technological no man's land," says Colby, who's provided a comprehensive and worthwhile overview of some of the difficult and painful technological and legal realities that we'll all be obliged to deal with sooner or later.
Unplugged ... published May 30, 2006 by AMACOM
Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers,
Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America by Tom Lutz
Don't let the breezy title fool you: this is a well-researched history of and meditation on the tensions between workaholic, Calvinist America and the slacker side of the same coin. It's an intelligent, worthwhile volume that raises important but usually unasked questions about working -- and not. The book was born of the author's surprise at his anger when his 18-year-old son took up residence on his couch. Lutz had bummed around for 10 years before "buckling down"; why the ire? "[M]y life of sloth," says he, "blends imperceptibly into my pathological flip side: my workaholism." Contradictions like these form the substance of the book. Ben Franklin, for example, famously advocated industriousness but was a world-class idler, while Samuel Johnson published the The Idler, argued for leisure, but worked feverishly. Among others Lutz scrutinizes are Herman Melville, Paul Lafargue, Oscar Wilde, and Jack Kerouac.
Doing Nothing ... published May 16, 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Knowledge Deficit by E. D. Hirsch
E.D. Hirsch may be America's most astute -- and perplexing -- education reformer. Though he's a New Deal liberal dedicated to leveling the social playing field by fostering widespread improvements in basic literacies, he's often been associated with such right-wing jerks as Allan Bloom or William Bennett. Anyone who's actually read Hirsch's Cultural Literacy (1987) knows that he and his essential ideas deserve better.
Unfortunately, his current offering may get him into more hot water with the Left, given his violations of various NEA and ed school dogmas: He writes favorably of academic and institutional accountability and fails to criticize all aspects of No Child Left Behind. (And what is he doing at the Hoover Institution? ... Yikes!)
But all that aside, a generation has passed since the publication of Cultural Literacy, and it's likely that most of today's educators never read it. That's a crying shame. In this recovering English teacher's estimation, Cultural Literacy should be required reading for all educators.
The Knowledge Deficit ... published April 24, 2006 by Houghton Mifflin
The Disposable American:
Layoffs and Their Consequences by Louis Uchitelle
[I]n 1984 the Bureau of Labor Statistics began to count "worker displacement." By 2004, the bureau had counted at least 30 million full-time workers who had been permanently separated from their jobs and their paychecks against their wishes.
Uchitelle, a veteran New York Times economic reporter, says that layoffs are actually even more pervasive than that -- and they're socially devastating, "eating at self-esteem on a mass scale. It is like acid rain eroding the environment." The author strikes a skillful, satisfying balance among incisive statistics, anecdotes, and analysis, showing that the 30 million Americans laid-off since 1984
did not include the millions more who had been forced into early retirement or had suffered some other form of disguised layoff. ... A more comprehensive survey would very probably have found that 7 or 8 percent of the nation's full-time workers had been laid off annually on average -- nearly double the recognized layoff rate.
The Disposable American ... published March 28, 2006 by Knopf
Absolute Convictions by Eyal Press
Shortly after the 1998 murder of abortion provider Dr. Barnett Slepian, one of Slepian's associates, Dr. Shalom Press, learned of a threat to make him the next victim. Press's son Eyal has since become a widely published freelance journalist, and he's now out with his first book: a superbly evenhanded and levelheaded volume about the American abortion divide and his family's involvement therein.
Among the tough questions Press explores is that of why America's abortion controversy has been so much uglier than any other country's. In the process, he interviews -- often with surprising empathy and civility -- some of the anti-abortion crusaders who had protested outside his father's clinic and the family's home. Among the book's great strengths (and there are many) are its meditations on how opposing sides in this most contentious of all issues could engage in productive dialogue.
Terry Gross interviewed Press about the book on Fresh Air.
Absolute Convictions ... published February 21, 2006 by Henry Holt and Co.
The Chosen by Jerome Karabel
The questions of who does and does not get into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton -- and why -- are matters of critical importance to America, given the wildly disproportionate power and privilege enjoyed by Big Three grads. A sociology prof at UC-Berkeley looks at 20th-century evolutions in the three institutions' admission policies, providing an interesting perspective on the histories that helped shape them.
For the purposes of his inquiry, Karabel divides the century into thirds, roughly. From 1900 through the Depression, he shows, the schools' admissions policies helped ensure that America's elite would remain largely WASP, wealthy, and Eastern. Merit ("Intelligence + Effort") began to trump pedigree during the mid-20th century, although the affluent are still grossly overrepresented at the three schools. Most interestingly, perhaps, Karabel looks at the dark sides of that bedrock of popular American social belief, meritocracy; one hopes that he plans to explore broader ramifications of meritocracy in future volumes.
The Chosen ... first published October 26, 2005 by Houghton Mifflin
The Shame of the Nation by Jonathan Kozol
Kozol's involvement with inner-city American schools dates to the 1960s, when he taught in the Boston Public Schools. Since then, he's been a leading chronicler of the deprivation, misery, and underfunding to be found in many urban schools. He rose to national prominence for his Death at an Early Age (1967), and has since authored numerous books that have dealt mainly with the harsh realities of big-city schools.
His latest, subtitled "The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America," addresses the re-segregation of United States schools and financial inequalities between predominantly white and non-white schools. Although he presents compelling statistics showing that many black and Hispanic schools' per-pupil funding is often only half that of nearby white schools, Kozol's primary focus is on the kids themselves. He gets to know them and stays in touch, and the heartbreaking tales he tells should constitute "the shame of the nation" -- if those holding the purse strings had any shame. Also recommended: Savage Inequalities.
*Also available, in abridgement, on Audio CD.
Shame of the Nation ... first published September 13, 2005 by Crown
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
by Barbara Ehrenreich
After trying to survive low-wage employment in Nickel and Dimed, Ehrenreich now goes hunting for a white-collar job. Roughly 1.6 million professional-level workers were unemployed when she began, and she shows that paying the bills can be quite as daunting for those from "good" families -- and who've "played by the rules" -- as it is for low-wage workers who chose their parents unwisely and didn't go to Harvard.
Ehrenreich finds that one of the main reasons she, like hundreds of thousands of other unemployed white-collar workers, wasn't hired is that she failed to exude the cheerily simple-minded attitude many businesses prize. She quotes Lucy Kellaway, writing for the Nov. 22, 2004 Financial Times, as having said,
Think what characterizes the really intelligent person. They love abstract ideas. They can look dispassionately at the facts. Humbug is their enemy. Dissent comes easily to them, as does complexity. These are traits that are not only unnecessary for most business jobs, they are actually a handicap when it comes to rising through the ranks of large companies.
We tell our children and young adults that to succeed they must study hard and develop their minds, but then condemn them to white-collar poverty if they won't become grinning, masochistic idiots: bait and switch. Even those who obligingly check their judgment at the office door and turn over their lives to the company ("they are available at all hours; they forgo vacations; they pull all-nighters") are subject to capricious termination in the white-collar world Ehrenreich confronts, yet they're expected to maintain relentlessly sunny dispositions through the extreme trauma of job loss, while evincing boundless "passion" for their next job.
*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD.
Bait and Switch ... first published September 8, 2005 by Metropolitan Books
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