by Chuck Klosterman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2016
Replete with lots of nifty, whimsical footnotes, this clever, speculative book challenges our beliefs with jocularity and...
An inquiry into why we’ll probably be wrong about almost everything.
The ever smart, witty, and curious Klosterman (I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined), 2013, etc.) takes on the notion that it’s “impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow.” One might call that a “klosterism,” and the book is full of them. It’s also full of intelligence and insights, as the author gleefully turns ideas upside down to better understand them. Klosterman is currently obsessed with ideas that are so accepted we dare not dispute them—e.g., gravity. Once upon a time, Aristotle believed things didn’t float away because they were in their “natural place.” Then Newton came along 2,000 years later and changed the way we think. Then Einstein said gravity was really a warping of time and space. Now, scientists are trying to “rethink gravity itself.” Therefore, the author posits, in the future, whenever that may be, we’ll know we were wrong about whatever we thought “gravity” was back then. In each chapter, Klosterman takes on a different topic, applying “Klosterman’s Razor” to it: “the philosophical belief that the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with.” He seeks out a variety of experts to assist him. George Saunders and Franz Kafka help him sort out why future literary greats are “at the moment…either totally unknown or widely disrespected.” Physicists Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene help him explore the concept of a multiverse universe. Others assist Klosterman in taking on the future of rock ’n’ roll (“there are still things about the Beatles that can’t be explained”), time, dreams, democracy, TV shows (Roseanne is an overlooked work of “genius”), and sports. Klosterman is fond of lists and predictions. Here’s one: this book will become a popular book club selection because it makes readers think.
Replete with lots of nifty, whimsical footnotes, this clever, speculative book challenges our beliefs with jocularity and perspicacity.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-18412-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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