Here, Derber (Sociology/Boston College; coauthor, Power in the Highest Degree, 1990) blames America's ethical, social, and economic collapse on ``wilding''—the same term used for the brutal 1989 attack by a gang of youths on a Central Park jogger. ``Wilding'' is an epidemic, Derber argues, ``seeping into America mainly from the top.'' Why use the term ``wilding''? ``Wilding includes a vast spectrum of self-centered and self- aggrandizing behavior that harms others.'' Its cause? A corruption of the American Dream. So, to Derber, ``wilders'' include not only Charles Stuart, who murdered his pregnant wife for the insurance, but ``billionaire king of junk'' Michael Milken; Ronald Reagan, who deregulated the S&Ls; and George Bush, who laid waste to Iraq in what the author calls the ``global wilding'' of the Gulf War. At the start, Derber describes the starvation-engendered ``wilding culture'' of Uganda's Ik tribes, whose ``self-preservation'' without limits meant even the killing of children. He then sounds the alarm for today's ``advanced wilding crisis,'' which has arisen in ``the new age of limits and polarization.'' His solution? ``Americans in the 1990's will have to rediscover and refashion a version of the moral dream that can temper the current fever of individualistic materialism and resurrect civil society.'' Derber looks to the team spirit of Michael Jordan and, in a few paragraphs, to ``Confucian'' Japan and to Germany, which prosper while seeming to fulfill basic social obligations of food, housing, and education. Few will argue that America isn't in crisis—but is it really caught up in a ``wilding'' frenzy? Derber uses the term so indiscriminately—to label and link crimes, social problems, political agendas, and causes and effects—that he squanders its meaning and sensationalizes, oversimplifies, or muddies issues that cry out for deep and finely tuned thinking. Every quote from Tocqueville makes you wish that he were still here to speak for himself.
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-571-12917-X
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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