A skillfully argued study of higher education.
A former Harvard president examines the moral and political criticisms leveled against elite universities.
Economic inequality in American society permeates its systems of higher education. In his latest book, following The Struggle To Reform Our Colleges, Bok examines the challenges facing these elite institutions through critiques made by the left and right. Liberals have decried practices such as legacy admissions (which favor applicants from wealthy families) and investing in companies that perpetuate “evils and injustices.” The author suggests that while legacy admissions might offer “modest financial gains” for the institutions, the practice is also at odds with “the more important public purposes that our leading colleges and universities ought to serve.” On other issues, such as investing in problematic companies, the ethics become murky. Divestment affects everything from faculty salaries to student aid. A moral compromise, like the one Bok tried to achieve by offering scholarships to Black South African students, tries to balance all factors, though with admitted difficulty. Where liberals tend to focus on social issues, conservatives focus on what they see as attacks on personal freedoms—for example, what they perceive as liberal indoctrination of students by leftist professors and a concomitant loss of free speech. While empirical evidence suggests the professoriate tends to attract more liberals, Bok suggests that elite colleges and universities can bring faculties into greater political balance by hiring professors based on real-world credentials, such as conservative representatives and staffers. At the same time, while diversity is the key to a thriving university, it can also give rise to incidents of bigoted speech, which Bok believes should be addressed through reassurances offered to offended students and reasoned conversations with perpetrators. In this evenhanded and pragmatic text, Bok presents an all-too-rare moderate perspective on a system as ravaged by extremes as the society it serves.
A skillfully argued study of higher education.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780300273601
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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