For those who get twee, the book is a soothing, self-justifying enabler; for those who don’t, it’s an amiable guide for the...
Salinger to Seuss and beyond: a flattering assessment of Pop Culture’s Division of Arrested Development, with some intriguing stops along the way.
As rock biographer and scribe Spitz (Poseur: A Memoir of Downtown New York in the ’90s, 2013, etc.) sees it, America is in the warm and loving grip of a revolution that worships all things small, geeky and outsider. Twee no longer means insufferable cuteness; now, it’s a kinder, gentler form of punk that fights oppression (bullying, meanness, etc.) in its own quiet, sensitive way. Historic touchstones range from icons of doomed sensitivity (Anne Frank, Sylvia Plath, James Dean) to introspective troubadours like Jonathan Richman, Nick Drake, Morrissey and Kurt Cobain. The twee aesthetic fetishizes childhood and fears growing up (Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, the kids in The Breakfast Club, everyone in Wes Anderson’s movies) and manifests a progressive, do-it-yourself sensibility. “Twee rebels don’t want to destroy everything around them,” writes the author. “Rather, they want to fix it.” Spitz astutely shows the Tweeing of America, offers some sharp insights (the Smiths and They Might Be Giants are the Beatles and Stones of Twee) and delivers a substantial history of indie cinema’s mumblecore movement. He’s too twee himself to be really critical, however; he’s a veritable Prophet of Portlandia, proclaiming that “the new culture of kindness is helping us improve as Americans.” He dodges the question he unintentionally raises: If tumultuous times create art, do peace, serenity and kindness really do anything substantial?
For those who get twee, the book is a soothing, self-justifying enabler; for those who don’t, it’s an amiable guide for the perplexed.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-221304-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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