A provocative volume that challenges humanity to correct its runaway course toward an increasingly violent future by...
Notable contemporary thinkers and creators give their individual perspectives in this compelling look at violence.
The project started in 2015 when journalist Lennard interviewed political philosopher and critical theorist Evans (Political Violence/Univ. of Bristol; Liberal Terror, 2013, etc.) for the New York Times philosophy blog The Stone. The resulting feature, “Thinking Against Violence,” was published in December 2015 and received widespread attention and discussion. The authors soon expanded on the theme, launching an ongoing successful series on violence that ran through 2016 in the same section, with Lennard and Evans picking the brains of scores of academic authorities and philosophers, including, among others, philosopher Richard J. Bernstein, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Simona Forti. Later, the series found renewed life in the Los Angeles Book Review, where the authors broadened the scope to include an even wider range of creative minds, including filmmaker Oliver Stone, South African musician and composer Neo Muyanga, and adult performer Mickey Mod. With a quest to “learn how to undo violence,” the authors compiled what they describe as “a series of conversations as a truly trans-disciplinary mediation with artists, writers and cultural producers that brings critical thought to bear on violence.” Often nodding to the pioneering groundwork of German philosopher Hannah Arendt, the book—a diverse compendium of 28 leading voices on the topic of violence—runs the gamut of themes, from violence in media and film to sex, gender, and race in the escalating age of violence. Other discussions include bullying and torture, war and terrorism, dangers of the normalization of violence, the influence of the digital age, climate degradation as a violent crime against humanity, and the important role ignorance plays in the perpetuation of violence. Other contributors include Elaine Scarry, Tom McCarthy, Moira Weigel, and Adrian Parr.
A provocative volume that challenges humanity to correct its runaway course toward an increasingly violent future by learning from its violent past.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87286-754-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
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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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