Sciolino incorporates numerous interviews in order to preserve a shrewd, journalistic distance in this illuminating book.
An American journalist in Paris offers a serious, skeptical study of France’s quintessential “soft power.”
The art of getting results by attraction rather than coercion is a long specialty of the French, especially in terms of politics, foreign policy, language, manners, food, culture and style. New York Times Paris correspondent Sciolino (Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran, 2000, etc.) presents some of the prevailing, socially accepted uses of opération séduction (“charm offensive”) that both bemuse her sense of American pragmatism and arouse her incredulity. Men of a certain age still tender the baisemain to married women (Hillary Clinton got one from President Sarkozy), women learn from the cradle to dress provocatively (and then welcome admiring remarks from strangers) and married people routinely take lovers as part of keeping “in good health,” while France’s national symbol is a sexy, barefoot commoner named Marianne whose bodice falls half undone. French politicians cannot get elected if they can’t demonstrate a vigorous capability: Case in point, when Sarkozy’s wife of many years left him for another man, he married supermodel Carla Bruni in a hurry and found his approval ratings soar. French shamelessness extends to politicians such as former presidents Mitterand, Giscard d’Estaing and Chirac, for whom the political office was another form of seduction. French professional women do not seem to be concerned that insistent male attention would be called harassment in the United States. Ultimately, Sciolino grates at the real problem unsettling the French—i.e., their fear of declinism, or decline. Their traditional arts of seduction—slow food, lace, finely crafted luxury items, etc.—are being threatened by globalization, eliciting a heavy sense of nostalgia for the era when beauty and pleasure reigned. Moreover, French leaders like Sarkozy still embrace a “profound unity of our culture,” even though about 10 percent of France’s population is “of Arab and African origin or descent,” underscoring deep fissures in France’s sense of its own national identity.
Sciolino incorporates numerous interviews in order to preserve a shrewd, journalistic distance in this illuminating book.Pub Date: June 21, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9115-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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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