A slightly uneven but admirable set of essays on America’s social dysfunction.
Townsend (Age of Barbarity, 2012) examines the nation’s ongoing cultural battles in this collection of Florida-centric essays.
As should be clear to anyone paying attention to current events, America still has quite a few unsolved problems involving issues of race, gender, poverty, addiction, political corruption, and general aggressiveness. These national issues are perhaps nowhere more visible than in Florida, and this is no recent phenomenon. Townsend, in this collection of essays, takes as his central metaphor the Seminole Wars of the early 19th century, particularly the first, when the United States military destroyed Spanish Florida’s “Negro Fort” at Prospect Bluff and killed the free black and Native American families who lived there. The intricacies of race, class, gender, and power have only grown more complex since, in both the country as a whole—whose father Townsend sees as being Andrew Jackson rather than George Washington—and Florida, in particular. The essays, written between 2008 and 2017, cover a range of Florida topics, mostly involving race and power. Townsend touches on obvious points of tension in recent years, including problematic practices of college football (including Florida State, whose team is called the Seminoles) and the murder of Trayvon Martin. The author digs deeper, however, introducing lesser-known stories, such as the career of a Polk County sheriff with a pro–National Rifle Association agenda. He also offers personal narratives, interrogating his own culpability in America’s failures. As he discusses such issues as the opioid epidemic, rape culture, and policing policies, Townsend dissects the lies that white America tells itself in the Sunshine State and beyond. As the white, educated descendent of slave owners, Townsend is upfront about the privileged position he occupies in the power structure: “I still benefit, generations later,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “from Prospect Bluff’s obliteration.” He thankfully pulls few punches when it comes to calling out the hypocrisy that underlies Southern white culture. Throughout this book, he manages to do so without becoming preachy, demonstrating a genuine affection for his home state and mixing in enough of his personal passions to make him feel relatable and trustworthy. A typical essay is “The Missing Art of Squandered Whiteness,” an examination of white privilege that becomes a rebuke of mainstream country music’s lack of social critique as well as an exaltation of the alt-country band Drive-By Truckers. Townsend is at his best when he plays critic; his long review of T.D. Allman’s Finding Florida (2013), a popular work of Florida history, is another bright spot. Some of the newsier pieces have less life to them, resembling angry letters to the editor or dashed-off newspaper columns. As a whole, though, the essays make for compelling reading. They feel like dispatches from the front lines of today’s virulent culture wars, in which one man desperately tries to convince his peers to put down their guns and take a look in the mirror.
A slightly uneven but admirable set of essays on America’s social dysfunction.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5305-5557-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
