by Claude Lévi-Strauss translated by Jane Marie Todd ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2016
Though representing a tradition that is now considered old-fashioned, Lévi-Strauss was quite the revolutionary in his day....
Previously ungathered pieces by the eminent French anthropologist, all addressing in some way the vexing question of relativism.
That question, as Lévi-Strauss (The Other Face of the Moon, 2013, etc.) formulated it, goes something like this: the job of the Enlightenment, out of which anthropology grows, is to devise the rules that describe a rational society of the sort that all societies should wish to become. At the same time, relativism “rejects any absolute criterion by which a culture could allow itself to judge different cultures.” Thus, there’s no such thing as an advanced versus a primitive society; thus, as the title suggests, we feast on one another’s flesh even though we’re not supposed to. Relativism does not keep us from contesting matters on cultural grounds, of course: Lévi-Strauss opens with an episode from the war on Christmas, namely a revolt 65-odd years ago in which the good citizens of Dijon, France, hanged the foreign character of Santa Claus from a rafter in the city cathedral. Though the pieces in this collection were published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica, that doesn’t keep Lévi-Strauss from entering into difficult thickets of thought. With ever an eye on the binary oppositions of structuralism, he notes that the Christmas incident illustrates the functions of society along “a dual rhythm of increased solidarity and exacerbated antagonism.” So much the better if that dual rhythm can be put to work pounding the other, though in the absence of the foreign, homegrown scapegoats will do. Sometimes clearly, sometimes behind layers of technical language, Lévi-Strauss ponders big questions: what does it mean to be “civilized”? What are the “modalities of cannibalism,” and why should we care? Presciently, he observes that even though we supposedly live in a global civilization, that does nothing at all to prevent those cultural collisions—and indeed, it “makes the clash between external differences sharper.”
Though representing a tradition that is now considered old-fashioned, Lévi-Strauss was quite the revolutionary in his day. These varied, smart pieces show why.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-231-17068-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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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