A multilayered but self-conscious adventure story told by National Geographic journalist Arden and photographer Wall, who embark on personal spirit-journeys while returning to investigate the living culture of Native American wisdom (their first account was Wisdomkeepers, not reviewed.) A spirit-journey is a journey into metaphor as a means to the belief system of others, as well as self. Using this definition of spirit-journey to drive the narrative, Arden and Wall take on a mission: tracing the dying generation of Native American elders known as Wisdomkeepers, for a National Geographic article. Multiple roadblocks, from professional red tape to personal prejudices, keep the actual stories of the Native American elders from being satisfactorily revealed. Instead, the roadblocks themselves become the predominant, but less compelling, story. As Arden and Wall pursue the “truth” behind “Indian ways——the work of “real” medicine men, Indian reactions and remedies to pollution and the desecration of ancestral graves—they frequently give less weight to the telling of the Native American point of view than to the telling of their own perspective as whites studying Indian culture. They travel from the Iroquois Nation to the Everglades to the Oklahoma burial grounds of the Shawnee, collecting Indian blessings and warnings about impending natural disasters. While the two journalists seem to connect intimately with Indian people, the poetry of Native American culture, and their experience of it, is replaced with more prosaic events like getting the Geographic editorial board to accept a story despite “mystical” overtones. The most important messages, spoken by Arden himself and Chief Shenandoah of the Six Iroquois Nations, are obscured by unending personal reflection. Arden says, “The great challenge of our time is to find metaphors that include rather than exclude.” Shenandoah says, “I’m working for the creation. I refuse to take part in its destruction.” If Arden and Wall had been less reluctant to exclude themselves in their self-reflection, the more important story of their involvement in the creation and its destruction might have been told. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-80094-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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