One of those tiresome books about traveling to a distant land to find a self never known—or in this case sidetracked by writer's block and unexpiated grief—now from journalist/novelist Latham (Crazy Sundays, 1971; Orchids for Mother, 1977). Depressed, unable to write, and haunted by the long-ago death of his only sister, whose name he is unable to speak, Latham accompanies his wife (CBS Washington correspondent Leslie Stahl), his young daughter, his brother-in-law, and his nephew on a safari to Kenya and to Diane Fossey's gorillas. There are the usual rigors and delights of life under canvas on upscale safaris. All the expected animals are sighted by the end, and colorful postcolonials like Anna Merz, whose pet rhino follows her around like any small dog, are encountered. The visit to the gorillas is arduous if rewarding, though Latham feels suffocated by the dense undergrowth, and not as free and hopeful as he does on the dry and sparsely treed plains of Kenya, which so remind him of his native Texas. Surprised by his ability to identify with the animals he sees, and letting go of the self in the process, his depression begins to lift, and he is finally able to talk about his sister. These moments of epiphany are not serendipitous, Latham concludes, but, rather, realistic responses to a region where humanity originated; when Richard Leakey suggests that they might be prompted by ``genetic memory,'' Latham agrees: ``We see the place where we came from, and we recognize it. We feel at home in East Africa...there is still no place like home no matter how long we have been away from it.'' Latham's grief and depression, for all their vivid (sometimes mawkish) reality, don't really add all that much to an otherwise thin, conventional, and frequently naive book. For hard-core safari-junkies only.
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-13-946021-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sometimes rueful, sometimes defiant, always affecting. Even McCain’s political opponents should admire the fiery grace with...
A valediction by the noted senator and presidential candidate.
Teaming up with constant collaborator and staff member Salter, McCain (Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War, 2014, etc.) looks back on a long career of service to the country. In a narrative bracketed by intimations of mortality—and by one friend in particular, a classmate who “was laid to rest in the Naval Academy’s cemetery on Hospital Point, a beautiful spot overlooking the Severn River”—McCain opens with a gentle dissection of his failed bid for the presidency, which he admits was a great disappointment but an honor all the same. The breaking news from that account is his retrospective wish that he’d gone with his gut and chosen Joe Lieberman as his running mate, sending “an emphatic statement that I intended to govern collaboratively with an emphasis on problem solving not politics, which in 2008 would have been very good politics.” Yet his advisers convinced him to go with the untested Sarah Palin, particularly as a way to send the message that he, not Barack Obama, was the real agent of change. McCain accepts responsibility for the resulting fiasco: “There’s no use bitching about how you were treated in a presidential campaign,” he writes, adding that he got to keep his day job in the Senate, where his friends have numbered Democrats such as Ted Kennedy—who, McCain notes, died of the same brain cancer that he is now battling—and moderate Republicans like Lindsey Graham. He has less use for the likes of Rand Paul, who stayed in the 2008 race longer than he should have in order to make “a point of some kind to his passionate followers,” and Donald Trump. On that note, he writes provocatively of his part in revealing the Steele dossier of the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia: “Anyone who doesn’t like it can go to hell.”
Sometimes rueful, sometimes defiant, always affecting. Even McCain’s political opponents should admire the fiery grace with which he’s exiting the world.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7800-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A provocative meditation on the way we live now.
Ottawa Citizen politics editor Potter (co-author: Nation of Rebels: How Non-Conformity Drives Our Consumer Society, 2004) argues that the widespread quest for “authenticity” simply exacerbates our discontent with modern life.
A journalist with a doctorate in philosophy, the author writes with authority about the ways in which today’s men and women seek authenticity, or meaning, in their lives—loft-living, ecotourism, yoga, the slow-food movement, etc. Dissatisfied with a world dominated by the fake, the prepackaged and the artificial, they seek “the honest, the natural, the real, the authentic.” But the quest is a hoax, writes Potter. There is no such thing as authenticity, any more than there is an authenticity detector that you could wave at something. Our search for authenticity is a response to the malaise of modernity. Emerging between 1500 and 1800, the worldview of modernity swept away traditional sources of meaning on a tide of secularism, liberalism and the market economy, leaving people with profoundly changed attitudes toward science, religion and personal identity. Potter draws nicely on the writings of Lionel Trilling, on philosophical thought from Rousseau to Diderot and on elements of popular culture from the singer Avril Lavigne to the TV program The Office. He shows how alienation from the ever-changing modern world has prompted several centuries of “rainbow-chasing” after authentic living that is often simply nostalgia for a nonexistent past or disguised status-seeking. For example, the case against suburban living “is little more than lifestyle snobbery disguised as a quest for authenticity.” Potter’s anecdote-filled book explores such topics as art forgery, plagiarism, organic living, fake memoirs, politics and Oprah Winfrey’s “cult of authenticity through therapeutic self-disclosure, of the sort promoted by her frequent guest Dr. Phil.” The author’s discussions of authenticity as a strategy for marketing “vintage” jeans and other goods and as a way of promoting an undiluted cultural past to tourists are especially rewarding. How to avoid the authenticity hoax? Potter writes that we must pursue forms of individualism that make peace with the modern world, with all its benefits and losses.
A provocative meditation on the way we live now.Pub Date: April 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-125133-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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