Frazier is an exemplary prose writer, and aspiring practitioners couldn’t ask for a better textbook.
A greatest-hits collection by the journalist and prolific author.
Frazier was born to be a magazine writer, quick to discern between a meaningful vignette and a subject for a long-form story. Here he gathers examples of both, originally published in venues such as the New Yorker and the Atlantic. The vignettes are everywhere, sketches that probe little-known corners of the human experience, such as a prize-winning rodeo bull rider from Kingston, New York, who didn’t have to travel far to win again at “Loretta Lynn’s Longhorn World Championship Rodeo,” held at Madison Square Garden way back in 1974. “Each bull has his own set of statistics,” Frazier writes, “just like a baseball player: how many people he’s bucked off, how many times he’s been ridden, how many times he’s made the national finals—things like that.” His visits with the plainspoken NPR commentator Kim Williams, the doyenne of Missoula, Montana, yield dozens of elegant observations, some well ahead of their time, as when she stands in Trump Tower on a visit to New York and declares, “I think someday all the rich people are going to take our resources and go live in a big, warm dome high above us somewhere.” Her takeaway: It’s inevitable, so make do with less. Among the longest pieces are a sardonic examination of life in Russia in the early years of the Putin regime, with Putin himself somewhat at a crossroads about how to celebrate the overthrow of the last tsar: “The example of, say, the civil unrest of early February 1917 may not appeal to a leader who faced widespread protests against his own autocratic rule.” It’s all highly readable, with some great turns of phrase (“Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die”). And if you want to know how prisoners score contraband cell phones, here’s where to turn.
Frazier is an exemplary prose writer, and aspiring practitioners couldn’t ask for a better textbook.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780374603106
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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
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