Encounter Books

Captures the moral, legal, medical and political complexities surrounding abortion.

The Western press these days is full of stories on China’s arrival as a superpower, some even warning that the future may belong to her. Western political and business delegations stream into Beijing, confident in China’s economy, which continues to grow rapidly. Crowning China’s new status, Beijing will host the 2008 Olympic Games.

But as Guy Sorman reveals in Empire of Lies China’s success is, at least in part, a mirage. True, 200 million of her subjects, those fortunate enough to be working in an expanding global market, enjoy a middle-class standard of living. The remaining one billion, however, are among the poorest, most exploited people in the world. Popular discontent simmers, especially in the countryside, where it often flares into violent confrontation with Communist Party authorities. In truth, China’s economic “miracle” is rotting from within.

In this extraordinary book, Sorman explains how the West has conferred greater legitimacy on China than do the Chinese themselves. He has visited the country regularly for forty years and spent most of the past three years exploring her teeming cities and remotest corners. Empire of Lies is the culmination of these travels and perhaps the only book on China that lets the Chinese people speak for themselves.

American society has become anti-male. Men are sensing the backlash and are consciously and unconsciously going “on strike.” They are dropping out of college, leaving the workforce and avoiding marriage and fatherhood at alarming rates. The trend is so pronounced that a number of books have been written about this “man-child” phenomenon, concluding that men have taken a vacation from responsibility simply because they can. But why should men participate in a system that seems to be increasingly stacked against them?

As Men on Strike demonstrates, men aren’t dropping out because they are stuck in arrested development. They are instead acting rationally in response to the lack of incentives society offers them to be responsible fathers, husbands and providers. In addition, men are going on strike, either consciously or unconsciously, because they do not want to be injured by the myriad of laws, attitudes and hostility against them for the crime of happening to be male in the twenty-first century. Men are starting to fight back against the backlash. Men on Strike explains their battle cry.

We are surrounded by medical miracles: polio has been eradicated; childhood leukemia is now treatable; death by cardiovascular disease has declined by two-thirds in the last fifty years. Yet while American medicine has never been better, angst over American health care has never been greater. Why is American health care such a mess? In this path-breaking book--Nobel laureate Milton Friedman calls it "fascinating and thorough"--Dr. David Gratzer goes to the heart of the problem, showing that the crisis in American health care stems largely from its addiction to outmoded and discredited economic ideas. What needs to be done? Dr. Gratzer mounts a bold and provocative argument, rejecting the conventional wisdom that socialized health care is compassionate and that top-down government agencies like the FDA actually save lives. Instead, he prescribes a strong dose of capitalism. The Cure offers a detailed overview of American health care, from economics and politics to medical science. Weighing in on the most controversial topics in health care, Dr. Gratzer makes the case that it's possible to reduce health expenses, insure millions more, and improve quality of care while not growing government or raising taxes. An award-winning author and essayist, he is a master storyteller, enlivening his book with anecdotes, interviews, and stories drawn from his own extensive clinical experience. He details the cardiac woes of Robert E. Lee and Dick Cheney, describes a chat over coffee with Canada's foremost private medical entrepreneur (an acquaintance of Fidel Castro, as it happens), and explains the evolution of his own thinking, from advocating HillaryCare as a medical student to promoting individual choice and competition today. The patient is in critical condition; Dr. Gratzer diagnoses the disease and prescribes the cure.