An inspiring and thought-provoking look at how ceremony helps us thrive.
How rituals old and new can ease life’s transitions.
The peppy, hopeful latest by journalist Feiler (The Search, 2023) finds the journalist hopscotching around the globe in search of both ancient rituals and newly created ones designed to help people weather changes, including birth, coming of age, marriage, and death. Among the ancient ones are the complicated, two-decade-long negotiation of how much a groom’s family should pay the bride’s in South Africa, a tooth-grinding ceremony in Bali, and a placental burial ceremony on Easter Island. Among the more recently created ones are Taylor Swift-themed divorce parties, gatherings to honor pregnancy loss, and ceremonies connecting parents with the children they have given up for adoption. Ever game and ever entertaining, Feiler throws himself into experiences, including a sauna/cold plunge in Denmark that left him “blue and rueful”; an encounter with a shaman in Chile; and a ritual bath (mikveh) in Newton, Massachusetts. His accounts are detailed and respectful, though occasionally laced with humor: His evocation of a day spent running from one Las Vegas wedding to the next and another where he attended three Irish wakes are surprisingly giddy. But that humor, never mean-spirited, is more often directed to himself than his subjects. Feiler convincingly makes the case that “rituals are the single most effective tool in holding any community together” and that “every life ritual is invented, reinvented, improvised, plagiarized, forged in crisis, modified in real time.” Finally coming out in favor of “DIY, micro, third-space rituals,” rather than more formal, institutional ones, he gently encourages readers to join with others in creating rituals that will serve to get them through hard times.
An inspiring and thought-provoking look at how ceremony helps us thrive.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9780593656433
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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