A stellar account of a complex offshore world, as seen through the tangled history of a humble barge.
The weight of the world, carried by one lowly barge.
“Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.” Gustave Flaubert’s astute observation applies well to Kumekawa’s fascinating study of what might be perceived as a banal subject not worthy of our attention: a hulking barge. In 2020 the Harvard historian learned that “a simple ninety-four-meter-long flat-bottomed hull” had been moored on New York’s East River in the 1990s. Upon it sat five stories of modified shipping containers—it served as a floating jail. Curious to know more, Kumekawa found that the vessel had a complicated history that reflected, as he writes, “the abstract forces that have transformed our world over the past forty years.” It was built as the Balder Scapa in Sweden in 1979. Owned by a Norwegian tycoon, its first mission was as a transport barge, towed to Scotland with the “madcap idea” of dredging up steel from World War I warships that Germans sank rather than turn over to the British. That venture fizzled, and the barge was repurposed as a “floatel” to house North Sea offshore oil drillers. The Falklands War got in the way of that plan. In need of housing for troops in the South Atlantic, Margaret Thatcher’s government leased the barge in 1983. “Luxurious they were not,” one pilot said of the accommodations. The vessel’s next stop: Germany, for factory workers building the VW Beetle. And then it was off to New York as a jail, followed by time in England serving the same purpose. In 2010 it was towed to Nigeria for offshore oil workers. Throughout his epic telling, Kumekawa weaves in lucid and eye-opening explanations of the murky worlds of tax havens and loose regulations. The barge is at the heart of it all. The vessel has “no motor, no keel, no rudder,” he writes, but his book has undeniable drive.
A stellar account of a complex offshore world, as seen through the tangled history of a humble barge.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593801475
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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