by Pico Iyer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 13, 2000
A delectable smorgasbord of bite-size travel details and large truths that offer a taste of the global world to come. Iyer (Tropical Classical, 1997, etc.) is an Indian born in England who moved to California, then Japan. This rootless cosmopolitan cannot even pronounce the first name he was given. His English, however, is rich enough to describe a “whole planet joyriding in somebody else’s Porsche” and Japan’s “promiscuous consumption of all the cultures in the world.” Iyer’s globe hopping racks up cross-cultural observations as fast as frequent-flier miles, conveying along the way the myriad challenges and delights of “living out of a linguistic suitcase.” He finds Buddhist anti-materialism more realistic than the American pursuit of happiness, a preference dramatized when a firestorm destroys his California home. A burning house is a Buddhist symbol of freedom from possessions, and Iyer is a global soul, not a mere jet-setter who quotes Emerson. A social consciousness—he points out that Bill Gates is financially worth a hundred million other Americans—also elevates his travel notes above CondÇ Nast. A polyglot world-city like Toronto lives up to his ideal of “the city as anthology,” but the homeless Iyer finally finds family and home in suburban Japan. True, their world is a giant souvenir store, but he appreciates the unambiguous concern of the Japanese with faking innocence, and is most at home among the displaced. Travelers who do not number themselves among these “multi-cultural foundlings,” where national borders are blurred, are now an anachronism: “The man who never leaves home may feel that home is leaving him.” Yet Iyer compares travel’s constant wonder at the foreign to childhood, the defining anchor that global souls lack. His descriptions of the bounty and paranoia of airports alone make his musings an ideal carry-on. An eloquent eulogy for our late millennium’s old-world order of provincialism, and a passport to our borderless future.
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-45433-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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