An attractive picture postcard with some hard words on the reverse.
An American art historian now living part-time in France loves its cultural sensual pleasures (350 different cheeses! cool cathedrals!) but condemns French xenophobia and anti-Semitism.
Lipton has traversed some of this autobiographical and historical terrain before (Alias Olympia, 1993, etc.). Although she still has many sharp things to say about her parents—unkind Dad divorced plump Mom and married someone more svelte—her comments this time are more nuanced and forgiving. She credits her father, in fact, for her early passion for Paris. Although he had never been there, he showed young Eunice picture books and told her stories. Floating just below the sometimes-turbulent surface of her prose are memories of the physical attraction the author felt for her father. She realizes that all her lovers have resembled him—“lean, hard, elegant.” And she has plenty of praise left over for the French. They like to touch one another, linger over lunch and coffee, converse. They have a rich heritage in architecture, painting and literature, though she argues that nothing much is going on there today. (Even London is more artistically exciting!) They believe in equality—unless, of course, you’re dark or Muslim or Jewish or otherwise Other. Lipton repeatedly condemns her second homeland for its vile history, her theme emerging ever more prominently as the text progresses. She spends some pages on the Dreyfus Affair, blasts the French for their eagerness to accommodate the Nazis during World War II, says searing things about their current treatment of Muslims and their enduring anti-Semitism. In one effective section, she dissects the typically French attitudes of the Impressionists: They painted happy, appealing people picnicking and boating on sunny days, yet many of those painters, whom she so admired in her youth, were anti-Semites of the most appalling sort.
An attractive picture postcard with some hard words on the reverse.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-7867-1626-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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
PERSPECTIVES
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