Though many of the articles collected here illuminate the surfaces of popular culture, the best of them go deeper into the heart of America.
Most of these essays are reported pieces, some of them profiles (of musical artists Bunny Wailer and Axl Rose), others long-form feature stories (on a Christian rock festival, reality TV, the Tea Party revolt). Yet New York Times Magazine contributing writer Sullivan (Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, 2004) is always inherently a part of these stories, conscious of himself as an observer and of his perspective as an interpreter, though never gratuitously or self-indulgently intrusive. As a writer for publications ranging from GQ to the Paris Review (where he is the southern editor), the native Kentuckian now living in North Carolina shows his familiarity with what one piece terms “the tragic spell of the South,” whether he’s writing about his complicated relationship with a literary mentor or rekindling memories of an evangelical past while bonding with believers at a music festival. Throughout, he recognizes the danger of “a too-easy eloquence,” and his appreciation of the “unknowable” Michael Jackson in particular challenges a facile understanding. As is usually the case in such collections, some of the pieces are slighter than others, though none seem journalistically dated. Even “At a Shelter (After Katrina)” comes alive on the page through the vividness of its sensory detail. Sullivan’s ambition is evident and suggests that he has a much bigger book in him, whether he’s examining “a historical portal [where] you could slip into it and get behind the eyes of the American mind for a minute” or contemplating “the future of the human race” (hint: It involves a war against the animal world, which may have some scientific basis or may be a flight of fantasy). Mostly impressive work from a writer who frequently causes readers to challenge their own perspectives.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-53290-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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