Bright, readable, overblown view of our hyperactive times.
Provocative analysis of stressed-out, striving upper-income professional couples cast adrift in today’s 24/7 market-based information economy.
In the past 30 years, trends in three areas—the growth of the service economy, women in the workforce and the revolution in computing and telecommunications—have given rise to an utterly new type of American living in a new cultural landscape, argues Conley (Sociology/New York Univ.; The Pecking Order: Which Siblings Succeed and Why, 2004, etc). Today’s elites are educated multitaskers in two-income families who find themselves in a world without familiar boundaries between home and work, juggling their own and their children’s schedules, always feeling that they should be elsewhere. In the Elsewhere Society, these young married professionals earning $200K suffer fragmented identities (investment bankers are alienated!), live multiple lives (with more available through new e-mail accounts) and anxiously work harder than ever to get ahead amid rising income inequality and the sense that they are poorer than others of their class. Further, because their service-economy careers produce nothing tangible, many of these professionals “feel like frauds,” writes Conley. While effectively describing the key forces now shaping American life, the author gets carried away in his speculation on their impacts, contriving needless new words (i.e., “intravidualism” is replacing individualism; we spend our time in “weisure,” combining work and leisure) and making the well-off sound like basket cases in a strange wireless land. Smitten by a visit to the Google workplace, he believes the weisure way of life there “epitomizes the Elsewhere Ethic” and points the way to successful living in the future. Many readers will recognize aspects of the new social landscape posited here but wonder whether the author has not exaggerated the great shift in how we live now, and shortchanged the countervailing power of individualism, common sense and traditional institutions.
Bright, readable, overblown view of our hyperactive times.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42290-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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