Excellent photos and unassuming journal entries preserve the emotions and sights of the early stages of a pandemic.
Hayes continues journaling about and photographing life in New York City, this time from quarantine.
In his latest, the author offers a slim, touching volume of jottings and images from his experience of the pandemic from the apartment he shared with his partner, the late Oliver Sacks. A recent New York Times article entitled “Publishers Snap Up Corona Books, From Case Studies to Plague Poetry” warned that “publishing books about an unfolding calamity, when the duration and outcome remain uncertain, carries obvious risks for authors and publishers.” With that in mind, Hayes’ sweet and searching record of life in March and April seems a bit like a work in progress. His chart “57 Days in the Pandemic in the United States of America” ends on May 7, with “1,292,623 confirmed & 76,928 dead.” Of course, since then, those numbers have risen precipitously—and promise to do so even more by the time the book is published. The photos serve as potent documentation of an unprecedented time: empty subway trains and stations at rush hour, for example, or portraits of masked store owners and delivery drivers, or solitary figures roaming the streets. The author includes pre-pandemic images for contrast: A colorful picture of a packed 8th Avenue in December, illuminated by brake lights and neon, contrasts sharply with a black-and-white image of the same corridor on April 6, its skyscraper canyons empty of all but shadows. The text is less dramatic though engaging and personable enough. The author’s firsthand intersections with the virus are limited to a couple of sick acquaintances and the effect of social distancing on a nascent love affair begun in December. A list poem recalling “The last time I…” did and saw any number of once-mundane things feels like an homage to Joe Brainard’s I Remember.
Excellent photos and unassuming journal entries preserve the emotions and sights of the early stages of a pandemic.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63557-688-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.
A waggish, cautionary compilation of pitfalls associated with systematic cognitive errors, from novelist Dobelli.
To be human is to err, routinely and with bias. We exercise deviation from logic, writes the author, as much as, and possibly more than, we display optimal reasoning. In an effort to bring awareness to this sorry state of affairs, he has gathered here—in three-page, anecdotally saturated squibs—nearly 100 examples of muddied thinking. Many will ring familiar to readers (Dobelli’s illustrations are not startlingly original, but observant)—e.g., herd instinct and groupthink, hindsight, overconfidence, the lack of an intuitive grasp of probability or statistical reality. Others, if not new, are smartly encapsulated: social loafing, the hourly rate trap, decision fatigue, carrying on with a lost cause (the sunk-cost fallacy). Most of his points stick home: the deformation of professional thinking, of which Mark Twain said, “If your only tool is a hammer, all your problems will be nails”; multitasking is the illusion of attention with potentially dire results if you are eating a sloppy sandwich while driving on a busy street. In his quest for clarity, Dobelli mostly brings shrewdness, skepticism and wariness to bear, but he can also be opaque—e.g., shaping the details of history “into a consistent story...we speak about ‘understanding,’ but these things cannot be understood in the traditional sense. We simply build the meaning into them afterward.” Well, yes. And if we are to be wary of stories, what are we to make of his many telling anecdotes when he counsels, “Anecdotes are a particularly tricky sort of cherry picking....To rebuff an anecdote is difficult because it is a mini-story, and we know how vulnerable our brains are to those”?
Hiccups aside, a mostly valuable compendium of irrational thinking, with a handful of blanket corrective maneuvers.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-221968-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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