In a book whose conclusions will be debated, Kennedy rightly suggests that quality journalism is not only salvageable, but...
A veteran media critic finds signs of hope as civic-minded billionaires do their best to revive newspapers.
Though the subtitle only mentions two moguls, the analysis devotes equal attention to three. Kennedy (Journalism/Northeastern Univ.; The Wired City: Reimagining Journalism and Civic Life in the Post-Newspaper Age, 2013) has been developing sources since he was a media watchdog for the alt-weekly Boston Phoenix, now defunct, and he knows that much conventional wisdom concerning the plight of newspapers misses the mark. He debunks the notion that newspapers were late to the internet game, showing just how early the leading ones jumped onboard. The problem is that newspaper sites offered content for free while charging for print. This wasn’t an issue when sites were so slow to load and few readers were accessing the internet for news, but it has since resulted in a broken business model, particularly since advertisers have fled print for the web, and the classifieds have largely gone to Craigslist. Though “moguls” often carries a negative connotation, Kennedy understands how publically traded corporations have decimated their newsrooms in the chase for profits, and many welcome the wealth of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Boston Red Sox owner John Henry as they try to keep the newspapers they bought (the Washington Post and Boston Globe respectively) afloat. As a cautionary tale, the author offers Aaron Kushner and the Orange County Register, which he attempted to revive with an emphasis on print but whose accelerated timetable showed how much more difficult the challenge can be with a comparative lack of resources. The answer, Kennedy suggests, lies not merely in moguls, but in the right moguls, ones who are committed to quality journalism as the key ingredient and who recognize that necessary risks might lead to costly mistakes. Though Bezos refused to make himself available, the author sees him as someone doing things right for the right reasons—an assertion sure to meet with rigorous arguments.
In a book whose conclusions will be debated, Kennedy rightly suggests that quality journalism is not only salvageable, but necessary.Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61168-594-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: ForeEdge/Univ. Press of New England
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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