Slightly alarmist, but necessarily so—required reading for conscientious citizens and a complement to Digital Destiny by...
An eye-opening examination of the ever-increasing power wielded by big media conglomerates.
There is a crisis going on behind the scenes of nearly every form of American media, according to Klinenberg (Heat Wave, 2003), but it’s one that average Americans aren’t likely to read about in their local newspaper, see on TV or hear about on the radio. As certain members of the FCC (supported by the Bush administration) seek to further deregulate the media industry, consumers are finding themselves with fewer sources of news, particularly important local news. Canned, prerecorded DJs dominate the airwaves; newspapers owned by mega-corporations are laying off many reporters who cover local beats (and are loathe to criticize big businesses that support them with advertising revenue); and what were once local TV broadcasts are now often farmed out to other locations, and stations are being forced to use prepackaged press videos cleverly disguised as news. Even more disturbing, notes the author, is the amount of money media lobbyists have at their disposal, money that may even be powerful enough to smother the last remaining bastion of democracy: the Internet. He hypothesizes that the day is near when service providers will be able to charge website owners a fee to provide content at high speeds—and block or considerably slow access to content on sites whose owners won’t pony up. Clear Channel and Tribune Company lead a cadre of mustache-twirling villains, while various grassroots activists and dissenting FCC commissioners Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein play the role of Don Quixote. There’s a sea of acronyms and interwoven relationships to navigate, but Klinenberg’s thorough reporting and cogent analysis clarify the complex ways in which media companies have become intertwined over recent years.
Slightly alarmist, but necessarily so—required reading for conscientious citizens and a complement to Digital Destiny by Jeff Chester (2006).Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-7819-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
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
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