Good insights into an area of personal life that most of us take too lightly.
A thoughtful exploration of privacy, a surprisingly controversial concept.
Observers generally approve of the 20th-century computer revolution but take a dim view of the 21st-century explosion of information gathering, big data, and social media. One result has been a stream of polemics that deplore this massive ability to sweep up our thoughts, quirks, and opinions. Mostly, critics worry that this will lead to an Orwellian world in which we placidly live under some universal eye. DeBrabander, a professor of philosophy, delivers an often disturbing addition to this genre. He acknowledges the usual worries about government surveillance and intrusive marketing technology and puzzles over one bizarre element: Most of us don’t mind giving up our privacy. In polls, subjects dutifully insist that they treasure personal information, but “when the rubber hits the road”—e.g., when offered coupons at the local supermarket—they happily reveal all. One marketer observed that “shoppers (especially younger shoppers) seem to have developed an almost infinite capacity for tolerating surveillance.” DeBrabander is a philosopher, so he does not provide a solution, but his analysis is solid. Physical privacy is a modern development; during most of history, even the prosperous lived with extended families and servants. The apartment and single-family house became standard in the 19th century, and the law ignored this area until the 20th century. The word “privacy” does not appear in the Constitution, and when the Founding Fathers urged its protection in other writings, they were referring to private property. Philosophers—from the Stoics and early Christians to Spinoza and Rousseau—extolled privacy as a source of personal autonomy “untainted by social influence” that cleared the way for intelligent decision-making. DeBrabander notes that scholars have long maintained that autonomous thinking laid the foundation of civilization and, later, liberal democracy, but he expresses skepticism.
Good insights into an area of personal life that most of us take too lightly.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-108-81191-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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