A bloody fine riposte to those who would censor with clouded hindsight and muddy reasoning.
Why the good old days were actually often quite nasty.
Since Schechter has made his living out of repackaging the grimmer elements of American Gothic, whether in true crime tomes about long-ago serial killers (Fiend, 2000) or a mystery series starring Edgar Allan Poe (The Mask of Red Death, p. 556, etc.), his position in the violent-media-is-corrupting-our-youth debate should come as little surprise. He doesn’t just pooh-pooh the bluenoses, he goes after them with a shovel as he argues that not only is today’s popular entertainment far from harmful in the way it dishes out the violence to a nation of couch potatoes, but that it is actually far more timid than the media of just about any previous period. What is surprising is how smart and enlivening his argument is. Think the 1950s was the Golden Age of inoffensive, quality television? Schechter’s deconstruction of the shocking violence and racism displayed in Davy Crockett will cure you of that notion—and that’s before he even gets started on trigger-happy westerns. Even more provocative is Schechter’s plunge into the glorious world of pulp fiction, ranging from the 1800s through the 1950s. His prodigious research enlightens the unwary reader about everything from Victorian penny dreadfuls (which reveled in true tales of cannibalism and murder) to the dead bodies and vileness that choked 19th-century American dime novels (which kids read by the fistful). By contrast, today’s primetime TV lineup of forensic shows and dirty-minded sitcoms hardly poses a threat to American youth, in Schechter’s view. Although his slim volume doesn’t completely demolish the idea that media can affect children in harmful ways, the author does effectively refute the notion that we are living in uniquely dark and violent times, when in fact it’s much the same as it ever was.
A bloody fine riposte to those who would censor with clouded hindsight and muddy reasoning.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-28276-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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