A brave narrative of radical empathy both for oneself and for others confronting the darkest darkness.
A multi-angled examination of suicide.
In 2017, several years after her first suicide attempt, Rebolini became so tormented by a desire to die that she checked herself into a psychiatric ward. In the years since that stay, she has performed sweeping literary, sociological, historical, and psychological research on the topic of suicidality, in an “effort to stake a claim in a conversation dominated by fear and disgust.” Rebolini has been depressed or suicidal most of her life and comes from a “family replete with mental illness”; her own extreme lows mix with those of her brother, Jordan, and other close friends to grant personal shape to a broader inquiry into not only what prompts individuals to engage the extremity of suicide, but also what constitutes recovery from a suicide attempt. Even as the author advances professionally, and achieves other lifelong dreams like marriage and motherhood, the possibility of suicide never disappears, and even the highs of career and family successes necessitate a certain contemplative navigation. She extrapolates from her own financial stress and career ambitions to critique modern stressors like expectations of productivity and barriers to mental health care, and literary figures like Sylvia Plath and David Foster Wallace offer both general lessons and notches against which to measure the severity of her own experience. Rebolini admits that suicide is “tough to talk about because so much of it doesn’t make sense” and that normalizing suicidal thoughts and acts carries a risk. She insists, however, on trying to walk this careful line, and her effort counters the shame of those trying to dodge a persistent desire to not exist, while extending compassionate understanding of and gentle guidance to all those who care for and worry about loved ones struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts.
A brave narrative of radical empathy both for oneself and for others confronting the darkest darkness.Pub Date: today
ISBN: 9780063295322
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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