Deep thinking about cities.
A history as well as a philosophical examination of humanity’s belief in progress and a better future as demonstrated in the spread of urbanization.
Carvalho, professor at Harvard, author of Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro, writes that just a few centuries ago everyone believed that divine forces governed the universe, everything worth knowing was known, and the future would resemble the past. Matters changed during the Renaissance. As a historian put it, “The future would be different from the past, and better, to boot.” By the mid-18th century, the expectation that humans had the capacity to make new futures and shape their own destinies had taken hold. Carvalho opens with the catastrophic 1755 Lisbon earthquake and tsunami and the subsequent rebuilding under autocratic guidance, partly frustrated (as usual) by property owners and tradition but which resulted in features heralding a new vision of progress: fewer monumental structures, wider streets (for fire prevention, not traffic), and an obsession with a grid layout as opposed to the old tangled pattern of streets. The iconic 1811 Manhattan grid established an even more radically modern relationship between planning and urban life: less religiously charged, and more open-ended. New York’s transformation in the 19th century exemplified transatlantic urbanization as a laboratory for social stratification, identity formation, and creativity. That was not part of the plan, but planners always underestimated how much cities would evolve within a few generations. Most readers recall the brutal Haussmann mid-19th-century transformation of Paris and L’Enfant’s dazzling 1791 plan for Washington D.C., but Carvalho, a Brazilian, pays more than usual attention to great South American cities as he delves into urbanization across the world from Delhi to Berlin to San Francisco and across Africa. Prediction is a mug’s game, so Carvalho confines his conclusion to heralding the long-delayed death of car worship and noting the movement of imaginative urban development to Asia.
Deep thinking about cities.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780691246550
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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