An impassioned, significant book from a newsman who made a difference.
A feisty newspaper editor speaks from the heart and the heartland.
In 2017, Cullen, editor and half-owner (with his brother, the founder) of the twice-weekly newspaper the Storm Lake Times, won a Pulitzer Prize for, as the judges wrote, “editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.” Those qualities are on ample display in the author’s first book, a hard-hitting, urgent, and eloquent portrait of his home town, “a dot of political blue” in a state that has emerged as a forecaster of national politics. Part memoir and family history, Cullen’s sharp political critique chronicles the dramatic changes and challenges faced by Storm Lake in the last four decades. Aiming to “print the truth and raise hell,” he has taken on issues such as pollution, climate change, gun rights, immigration, political corruption, and the inexorable advent of industrial agriculture, dominated by Monsanto and Koch Fertilizer, which has promoted “a way of doing business more sacred than the life of the community.” Abetted by politicians, corporate agriculture “got a green light to charge full speed ahead” until his newspaper’s reporting “revealed who pulls the marionette strings” in Iowa. An informed electorate, writes the author, must be willing to take on stewardship of the Earth: “It doesn’t cost billions more to let rivers run clean. It takes a conscience.” Besides exposing the fouling of lake and soil, his paper helped Storm Lake’s largely white community understand—and welcome—an influx of aspiring newcomers from around the world. Cullen excoriates the “brand of radical politics steeped in resentment” fomented by Donald Trump and Iowa’s Republican congressman Steve King, “the voice of the hardscrabble western part of the state that forever thinks it has been forgotten and neglected and flown over.” Trump’s victory in 2016, Cullen asserts, does not predict the outcome for 2018 or 2020. Iowans, he alerts Democrats, are “yearning for a revival message” rather than “the message that tears down.”
An impassioned, significant book from a newsman who made a difference.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-55887-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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