An occasional muddy patch, but worth wading through for the author's insights.
If the proper study of mankind is man, anthropology ought to be the most vital of all sciences. In this collection of essays, reviews, and speeches from the last 20 years, one of the modern giants of that discipline offers his wisdom.
Geertz (After the Fact, 1994) opens with a brief professional autobiography, which for him began with his arrival at Antioch as one of the GI generation. He then passed through Harvard's short-lived but seminal Soc Rel program, doing important fieldwork in Java and Morocco, and finally arrived at Princeton's Institute of Advanced Studies. Along the way, he watched the nominal subject of his discipline alter radically: the few `primitive` cultures still on Earth are busy acquiring transistor radios, and even the notion of `culture` is now open to question. At the same time, anthropology must face ethical questions on the nature of fieldwork. Is any honest relationship possible between a college-educated American and a Javanese subsistence farmer, each seeking in some way to exploit the other? How does an anthropologist come to terms with the legacy of colonialism that lies at the roots of his discipline, and to what extent are his studies in conflict with the aspirations of oppressed people to better their lives? In and around these questions Geertz weaves considerations of issues specific to his discipline, notably the roles of behaviorism, structuralism, and other modern philosophical tools in the interpretation of culture. Geertz stoutly resists the impulse to simplify, and the reader who isn't up-to-date on debates within anthropological circles may occasionally find the line of argument hard to follow. But overall, this is a provocative look at the human race (and the study thereof) by a man who has seen more of it than most.
An occasional muddy patch, but worth wading through for the author's insights.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-691-04974-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
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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