An effective, humane look at financial practices hobbling venerable institutions.
Communities suffer when profiteers prevail.
Greenwell’s debut does important work, scrutinizing a poorly understood sector of the economy that makes life more precarious for many Americans. Private equity firms own hundreds of hospitals and newspapers, supermarket chains, countless smaller companies, and “the rights to Taylor Swift’s first six albums.” Yet the industry—as exemplified by Bain Capital, co-founded by Mitt Romney—has remained willfully “opaque,” spending tens of millions of dollars to elect lawmakers who protect its bountiful tax breaks and enable its ruthless profit-making maneuvers. Greenwell began her research after private equity bought and enfeebled her then-employer, sports website Deadspin. Spotlighting four people whose lives were adversely affected by private equity—a doctor, a retail worker, a journalist, and an affordable housing advocate—she carefully demonstrates the human cost of an industry playbook that prizes cutting workers, slashing services, and raising prices. The financial risk is small for private equity firms, which rely on money from investors—frequently, municipal pension funds and university endowments—and loans that they’re “not legally responsible for” because they’ve been taken out in the name of the company being purchased. As a result, vital hospitals and popular stores close or are driven into bankruptcy, and many people lose jobs. The retail worker Greenwell profiles was such a committed employee that she got a tattoo of the company’s mascot, but when private equity cut her job along with many others, she had to fight for even a sliver of the pay she was owed. While showing how private equity has recently shifted its emphasis from retail to “recession-proof” industries like health care, Greenwell also finds reason for hope in her subjects’ nascent activism. One of her subjects helped address a private equity–created health care shortage by helping found a new hospital.
An effective, humane look at financial practices hobbling venerable institutions.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9780063299351
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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