Superb writing, subtle thinking. Just the thing for politics junkies and journalism buffs, especially those wondering who...
One of American journalism’s brightest intellectual lights shines forth in a fine—and long overdue—selection from four decades of work.
Borrowing his title from that of Dwight Macdonald’s left-leaning, mid-20th-century magazine, Hertzberg—who, as David Remnick notes in his foreword, is now “the political voice of The New Yorker”—offers a nicely catholic definition of what politics encompasses and who makes politics tick. In that vein, he opens this overstuffed anthology with a piece describing the San Francisco sound for Newsweek readers not yet hip to the scene, instructing them that the audiences for the likes of the politically astute Grateful Dead include people just like them, “like the crew-cut blond boy in chinos and poplin jacket, whose brunette date wears a plaid skirt and knee socks.” Newsweek didn’t run the essay, in which Jerry Garcia makes pronouncements worthy of Talleyrand (“Language is almost designed to be misunderstood”), but no matter: Hertzberg follows it with a generous sampling from the ’60s era, including pieces that hit on Woodstock, the Weather Underground, and the invasion of Cambodia, before moving on to his stride-hitting analyses of mainstream political culture. Organized thematically, these pieces visit and revisit actors and motifs. All are marked by Hertzberg’s touching insistence that humans are rational creatures and that our politics ought to reflect as much. Thus the fuss over Gary Hart’s dalliance with Donna Rice, way back in the pre-Monica days, is hurtful because it “diverts our attention from public questions; it makes us respond inappropriately and disproportionately”; thus the war on drugs emerges as a “costly jihad”—just the right word—that “has scared off some casual users, but it has done nothing to reduce the number of hard-core addicts”; thus the sitting president’s way of catching lucky breaks makes for an especially maddening spectacle: “The fact that the 9/11 terrorists gave Bush what he could not earn on his own, a political majority, deepens the bitterness.”
Superb writing, subtle thinking. Just the thing for politics junkies and journalism buffs, especially those wondering who merits wearing Izzy Stone’s mantle today.Pub Date: July 13, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-018-1
Page Count: 670
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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