In his unique satiric style, at once lyrical and salted with allusion and self-reference, Vizenor (Dead Voices, 1992, etc.) savages academics and lampoons Anglo-Americans generally for their interference with and misperception of Native American reality. Almost Browne, the hero of this endlessly reconfigured comedy, is a man about whom little is certain, except that he was born on the side of the road in the back of a station wagon, almost on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. Fully invested in the trickster tradition as an adult, he wastes no opportunity to confuse those in search of answers, telling ``tricky'' tales to relatives and anthropologists alike, and flaunting a distinctly native presence in front of those who prefer the assimilationist, ``melting pot'' notion in culture theory and everyday life. Invited as commencement speaker to the University of California, his talk, which disparages academia, alienates the faculty and students but leaves the joint jumping and alive with questions. Similarly, in a memorable cross-dressing performance, Almost turns on the heat in a native beauty pageant, winning the contest by lip-synching and sashaying his way through Peggy Lee's ``Fever''—an intentionally ironic choice given the role of disease in the history of native- white relations. Other members of Almost's family figure plausibly in the tale as well, from his cousin, the narrator, to his great- uncle, Gesture, who runs a free train around the reservation and does the tribe's dental work gratis. The final segment, though, featuring a band of medieval monks who set up a monastery near the tribe, has seemingly little to do with what has come before. Some loose ends and a fondness for narrative loops are drawbacks, but the novel also draws real strength from its style and wit; those acclimated to Vizenor's eclecticism will find much here to enjoy.
Pub Date: May 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-8195-5304-2
Page Count: 184
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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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