A book to be thankful for—sympathetic to human foible, deeply learned and a pleasure to read.
An anthropological and philosophical account of how and why we give thanks—or, at times, resist doing so.
Former classics professor Visser (The Geometry of Love, 2000, etc.), a deliberate writer whose lovely books are few and far between, ponders why it is that we are moved to say “please” and “thank you.” Are we hard-wired to do so? Perhaps, for, as Visser writers, “in states of aphasia, or in people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, these little phrases often survive the shipwreck of all other memories.” The author’s investigations take readers around the world, perhaps most fascinatingly to Japan, where the need to thank prolifically and to extremes of self-effacing near-groveling is a deeply ingrained thing, an expression of a view that we’re all in this together, the living and the dead alike, and that we all owe everyone else on the planet thanks for allowing us to survive. The Japanese way of giving thanks involves phrases whose literal meanings acknowledge one’s inferiority: “This is poison to my soul,” “This doesn’t really taste very good, but please eat it,” “I feel shame.” The network of obligation a Japanese thanks implicates is profoundly different from the way an American might feel, and indeed Americans are widely perceived as a people who apologize without really meaning it. “Bilingual Hindi-English speakers in India thank more often in English than they do in Hindi,” Visser writes, continuing her planetary researches before settling down to examine our own culture more completely. She looks at the expressions of thanks in Dickens’s Great Expectations, the custom of tipping (which is abound up with hidden traps of social rank and equality), the perils of gift-giving, the even greater perils of stinginess and other such diverse matters of nature and nurture, all delivered in elegant, clear prose.
A book to be thankful for—sympathetic to human foible, deeply learned and a pleasure to read.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-15-101331-9
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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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