It’s good to sound the alarm, but having a plan to go with it would be welcome.
“The digital generation” would perhaps be surprised to learn that the cultural mores around sexual relationships have an ebb and flow to them—that “hookup culture,” as it’s commonly referred to now, is similar to the way things were back in the 1960s.
The difference can be found in the underlying motivations. While the ’60s were about breaking the shackles of a conservative society, the current wave of promiscuity seems to be a factor of boredom, of not having a template for what a “relationship” means, and of the barriers around pornography dropping as the Internet grows. Freitas (Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses, 2008, etc.) explores her experiences with college students who, she suggests, are fed up with the emptiness and trivialization of the hookup culture. Pornography has gone from an illicit pleasure to something more akin to “research,” and the constant access afforded to the always-connected youth has resulted in a sort of expectation that the roles in pornography are the roles males and females should play if they want to fit in. Freitas examines the dogged persistence of the boys-will-be-boys stereotype that starts at an early age and is reinforced throughout childhood and adolescence; the stigma of college virginity; and the informality and “relaxed” nature of hookup culture, as opposed to the formal dinner-and-a-movie first date (or any date). She questions the role of the HBO show Girls, with its portrayals of the sex lives of women as sources of boredom and depression—is the show simply mirroring culture, or is it also reinforcing it? Freitas poses more questions than she answers, and the “practical guide” of ways to affect change only amounts to a scant few pages in an appendix, with little attention to the role of technology and the narcissism perpetuated by social networking.
It’s good to sound the alarm, but having a plan to go with it would be welcome.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0465002153
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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