A well-reasoned set of prescriptions for building a better future.
A Rules for Radicals for our time.
Atlantic staff writer Beckerman opens with one of the best known of Josef Stalin’s literary victims: the poet Osip Mandelstam, who composed a poem so dangerous that he did not write it down. Yet, once he had recited the poem to a few people, the authorities descended, asking what his purpose was in his composition: “He wrote it, he said, because he hated fascism, hated it more than anything else; it was as simple as that.” Well, it’s clear that fascism hasn’t gone away, and contesting it requires Mandelstam’s clarity—arrived at, Beckerman suggests, by addressing the question, “Can I live with myself?” That question, he adds, “is what makes a dissident a dissident,” someone whose beliefs accord with their actions. It’s not an easy thing to do or be: Having to make one’s own choices, to elect to be free, is harder work than having someone decide for you. Beckerman then offers a series of mantras, some of which might seem contradictory on the face: “Be Pessimistic” doesn’t immediately square with “Be Funny.” Yet, as he notes, pessimism doesn’t equate to fatalism (the resigned certainty that things not only can but will get worse), and the aim of being funny is to lampoon those in power (fascists being notoriously without a sense of humor). Beckerman also writes, pointedly, that fascists gain authority not simply by violence or the threat of it, but also by coopting culture—by, let’s just say, cowing comedians and placing fellow travelers at the helm of news programs. More, Beckerman makes an important distinction that’s worth remembering: The point of dissent is to insist on a society worth living in and a government worth living under, one that obeys its own laws—and to believe, if such things have been damaged beyond repair, “that you can always begin again.”
A well-reasoned set of prescriptions for building a better future.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9798217089215
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
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
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
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