A few kernels of insight buried under layers of grad-student balderdash.
Not all graffiti artists are hoodlums, declares Snyder (Sociology and Anthropology/Baruch Coll.).
Possibly the best thing about this ethnographic thesis on New York graffiti artists is that the author doesn’t pretend to be one of them. He exhaustively lays out his own background—Irish-Catholic kid in Green Bay, Wis.; ardent lover of punk rock and hip-hop in college; misfit graduate student at the New School in New York City—before getting much into those of the men he is writing about. (This is not, by and large, a woman’s world.) Snyder follows ethnographic discipline to a fault, explaining time and again what his methods of field research were and how he came into contact with the graffiti “writers” who spread their art over the walls, tunnels and store grates of New York. More suitable for a paper being presented to a degree review board than for a general-interest book, this approach doesn’t leave much room for his actual on-the-ground research, most of which was conducted in the late ’90s and is now out of date. There are some worthwhile passages amid the portentously deployed academese, however, particularly those on the writers’ actual working methods. Snyder may hammer home a few points with numbing repetitiveness, but the points are worth making. First, the connection between rap culture and graffiti is weaker than most people believe; many of the artists here identify more closely with punk than rap. Second, graffiti as an art form doesn’t necessarily have a direct link to criminality. The author points out that it’s frequently thicker in tourist areas like Soho than in poorer, less-trafficked locales, showing that for most writers having their work seen is more important than anything else. Snyder, who clearly became too close to his subjects to retain much objectivity, too breezily brushes aside citizens’ concerns about graffiti. Nonetheless, his book will prompt readers to look again at graffiti scrawls they may previously have ignored.
A few kernels of insight buried under layers of grad-student balderdash.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8147-4045-3
Page Count: 248
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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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