An unsettling meditation on bleak times.
A celebrated poet asks how to live.
When she was an undergraduate, Rankine (Citizen: An American Lyric, 2014) discovered a kindred spirit. To acknowledge their “twinned feeling of brokenness” and “misalignment with the world,” the two devised a strange game: “When we spied the other during the day,” Rankine recalls, “we had to collapse, as is often the trajectory in Greek plays where one then another becomes gagged by terror. Exploring this “fabricated sisterhood,” Rankine now refers to her friend as “the theorist,” who has opted to use nonbinary pronouns and appears to be a composite of Judith Butler and Lauren Berlant, among other outspoken feminist philosophers. Their response to brutality and injustice has become radically different from collapse. Rankine knows that the theorist gave up “a life, a landscape, family, friends, in search of another route,” but she cannot follow that example. She reads the theorist’s books and attends their lectures, but although once their ideas seemed like “a portal to what was possible,” now Rankine struggles to make sense of their “combative” stance: “What does fighting back even look like?” she asks. “What does it mean to do something when the rule of law, voting rights, checks and balances, decency, the democratic laundry lists mean less and less?” If she has collapsed into a “pained and callous position of witness and observer,” what does it mean to remain in “a state of protracted grief…asked to be silent about our feelings and our responsibility to the buried and unburied.” When the theorist asks her to help a refugee couple by allowing them to use her Berlin apartment, Rankin demurs, fearful of making herself vulnerable. “We are trying to gain footing by landing without putting our hands out to any other,” she admits. Illustrated with politically resonant artworks, Rankine’s lyrical melding of memoir and criticism poses urgent questions.
An unsettling meditation on bleak times.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2026
ISBN: 9781644454008
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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
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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