Though long, Kloppenberg’s account is not exhaustive, and there is plenty of room for interpretation and annotation. A book...
An original discussion of how the idea of democracy took root and has been transformed in the West.
It’s a Greek thing, of course. However, writes Kloppenberg (History/Harvard Univ.; Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition, 2010, etc.), in the hands of Westerners—mostly Protestants, at least at first—the idea of democracy as a dangerous doctrine of the mob was reshaped into an ideal. As the author writes without apology, much of this transformation occurred in the former British colonies that became the United States, where, at least from a British nobleman’s point of view, mob rule did take hold. Kloppenberg locates some of the sources of this remaking of democracy in Enlightenment readings of the Bible and antiquity, and he considers its religious origins to be underappreciated in the historical literature. He further identifies three contested principles in debates about democracy: popular sovereignty, autonomy, and equality. As he observes, the ability of people to govern themselves without an entrenched class of overseers has long been a matter of controversy, though the argument has a chicken-and-egg quality to it. In any event, Thomas Jefferson dismissed it neatly by saying that taking sovereignty away was not the issue but rather improving the people’s capacity to make sound judgments. Surveying the subsequent political landscape, Kloppenberg allows that the debate has found plenty of room to continue to rage. Elsewhere, he writes of the idea that the people have not just the right, but also the duty to resist “tyrants who flout divine law,” as well as the idea that the source of authority truly lies in the consent of the governed and “the conscience of individual citizens.” A bonus for fans: Kloppenberg finds fresh things to say about both John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville—no small feat.
Though long, Kloppenberg’s account is not exhaustive, and there is plenty of room for interpretation and annotation. A book to read, profitably, alongside Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies.Pub Date: June 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-505461-3
Page Count: 964
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
