If you never made it all the way through Allan Bloom's ponderous bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), then this short and provocative book, first published in France in the same year, is the perfect way to catch up with the larger issues in the culture wars. Like Bloom, this reformed French radical provides the philosophical contexts for the current battles over multiculturalism, social constructionism, and postmodernism. Unlike Bloom, Finkielkraut (The Imaginary Jew, not reviewed, etc.) doesn't deplore popular culture, except when it's treated with the same reverence as the great works of Western civilization. Extremely lucid, this polemical meditation on the history of ideas diagnoses decline from Herder's historicism and concept of national cultures, which later transformed into the Germanic cult of origins, and the rise of the social sciences. Classic ideas of liberty were subsumed by collectivism—a struggle well illustrated by the battle over Alsace-Lorraine: Do individuals have any say in their national feelings? Along the way in this grand historical debate, transcendent ideas of art (as Good, True, and Beautiful) also fell into disrepute, so that the two notions of ``culture'' (the aesthetic and the anthropological) collapsed into one. Romantic ideas of nationalism transform in our time into the radical anti- individualism of post-colonial thinkers such as Fanon, who rejects cosmopolitanism for ``identity politics.'' Finkielkraut, unlike Bloom, attends to the materialist explanations for decline—the rise of consumer capitalism and the triumph of youth culture. Finkielkraut's celebration of the French Enlightenment tradition seems a far more rational prescription than Bloom's dyspeptic Platonism. Despite Finkielkraut's Gallic disregard for Anglo-American thought and his translator's clueless introduction, this passionate essay is a welcome moment of brightness in the increasingly murky debate.
Pub Date: April 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-231-08022-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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