For would-be dynasts, and a pleasure to read, even if it won’t lessen the suspicions of the anti-aristocrats among us.
Daddy’s got the cash and the connections—so why worry about competing on your own merits?
Americans have long mistrusted the family-based dynastic power that has fueled many an aristocracy across time and space, writes Doubleday editor-at-large Bellow—himself the son of novelist Saul, and with much of the old man’s skill with a pen. So have modern Europeans, whose recent history can be read as “a protracted dialogue between the forces of nepotistic solidarity and the growing emphasis on individualism, merit, and efficiency.” The ambition of families regularly thwarts democratic institutions, and many a nation and company have come a cropper at the hands of a leader’s less talented offspring. But, Bellow insists, this need not be the case, and nepotism need not be a synonym for “favoritism for the undeserving.” Arguing that the very phenomenon of nepotism has deep-seated origins in the process of natural selection and the Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest—it is, after all, the perfect expression for the notion of the “selfish gene”—Bellow combs the history books for examples of family that have done well and done good, the Pericleses and Adamses and Roosevelts of the world. (Well, the Roosevelts are perhaps not the best case in point, Bellow adds, for FDR took a modern, hands-off approach to fatherhood, serving as a “fond but largely passive absentee” whose children emerged as “spoiled opportunists who didn’t hesitate to sell their family name to the highest bidder.”) Bellow’s research is vigorous, his writing entertaining and informative, and if his narrative goes on too long by half, it is largely because of his Homeric cataloguing of dynasties successful and otherwise in politics (the Bushes), Hollywood (the Bridges), literature (the McPhees and Cheevers), and other fields of endeavor. His argument that families—and societies—get out of their descendants what they put into them seems particularly inarguable in light of good evidence such as the case of Richard Williams, who set out to produce a tennis dynasty with his daughters Serena and Venus, to the lasting delight of fans.
For would-be dynasts, and a pleasure to read, even if it won’t lessen the suspicions of the anti-aristocrats among us.Pub Date: July 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-49388-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
