NON-FICTION
The Truth About the Drug Companies
By Marcia Angell, MD
The former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine makes a very strong case regarding our conflicted relationship with pharmaceutical companies.
On The Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health
By Jerome Kassirer, MD
Another former editor of the NEJM reviews the influence of drug companies and other medical suppliers on the moral compass of physicians.
The Great Unraveling
By Paul Krugman
Once help arrived in New Orleans after the destruction by Katrina, the TV talking heads shifted their focus away from the failures of the evacuation and relief effort to whether this catastrophe would effect major change in our cultural and political lives.
Paul Krugman is a better writer than talking head and he rarely appears on the Sunday morning news programs. An economics professor at Princeton, he is also a columnist for the New York Times. This book is a collection of columns he wrote between 2000 and 2003.
His central theory is that the Bush administration is a "revolutionary power" committed to replacing the post-New Deal order with an undiluted plutocracy. He writes clearly about complicated issues and offers plenty of data to support his theories regarding the intersection of business, economics and politics.
Many will think this book is all just Bush bashing, and there is plenty of that. But the book also compels us to think seriously about the proper role of government.
Many on the left would argue that the racial and economic divide revealed in our recent national disaster, likened to the sinking of the Titanic, argues for more government. Safety net? What safety net, and what should be the weave and who is holding the ends?
Others ask if we can't trust government to respond with appropriate urgency, coordination and fairness, how can more government be the answer?
The subtitle of Krugman's book is "Losing our Way in the New Century." To find our way will require national reflection regarding what we expect from government, and how we can make it more effective and more accountable to the greater good. This lively and superbly informed book is a compelling start.
The World is Flat
By Thomas L. Friedman
This is the best book I read this past summer. You may remember From Beirut to Jerusalem, about 15 years ago for which Friedman won a Pulitzer Prize. In this latest book Friedman describes the convergence of technology that allowed India, China (and many other countries) to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the world's two most populous nations. Friedman translates complex economic and foreign policy issues so that even I could understand the implications. An economist, he clearly believes that globalization can benefit all of us, but we need to be aware and prepared, and we need to face our relationship to a much wider world in a less self-satisfied way than we have to date. There are plenty of implications here for business, for politics, for your personal budget and for careers for our kids. Buy this book.
Pillar of Fire
By Taylor Branch
Published in 1999, this book is a sequel to Parting the Waters, America in the King Years and will be followed by a third. It covers 1963-1965 and is a fascinating and detailed account of the civil rights movement at its height. Since I was about 8 years old at the time, I have only vague recollections of the violence of that era. But as we have witnessed the manslaughter conviction this summer of a Ku Klux Klansman for the murder of three civil rights workers forty-one years ago, the history of that time is still relevant. And we can appreciate the fragile coalition around Dr. Martin Luther King, and the amazing regular people, black and white, who were a part of this movement.
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