Cultural historian Finch (co-author, Gone Hollywood, 1979; Rainbow, 1975) deftly examines Americans' auto eroticism and the revolutionary alterations it has made in the country's landscape. Most of the sources Finch uses are secondary histories, and some of his material—such as the sexual symbolism of the automobile—has been discussed so often as to be hackneyed. The coverage of topics is also standard: from the early innovations of Germany's Daimler and Benz and America's Duryea brothers through L.A.'s development as the first decentralized, auto-centered city, down to the crunching oil crises of the 1970's. Yet Finch excels in detailing how autos have expressed the deepest impulses of the American psyche. ``Nothing,'' he notes, ``has played a more potent role in the waking dreams of twentieth-century Americans than the automobile.'' Often ironically, he underscores correspondences between the car and other aspects of popular culture, such as the fashion and movie industries. He is tugged between concern over the ills bred by the automobile and affection for its frequently raffish ``kitsch culture'' progeny, including diners, billboards, shopping centers, motels, and franchise operations like McDonald's. He also turns in fascinating analyses of the car's role in crime; the ``geographic restlessness'' permeating Raymond Chandler's glimpses of L.A.; and the development of hilly, even mountainous areas. Even as automobile body-types have become homogenized, Finch shows, Americans continue to personalize their vehicles through vanity license plates, custom vans, and bumper stickers. He suggests that such individualism should be taken into account as legislators propose remedies for oil-induced ills like smog, excess traffic, and gas shortages. A bracing tour through 20th-century American culture. (One hundred b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: July 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-016551-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
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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