A contradictory book of social and legal commentary that attempts to embrace so-called New America's increasingly multiracial character and deal with the author's lingering doubts about Americans' real capacity to live with our ethnic differences. A son of Richmond, Va.'s WASP elite, a former deputy attorney general for civil rights under President Reagan, and a federal judge since 1984, Wilkinson has seen the handwriting on the wall, recognizing that America's customary bipolar, black-and-white concept of race is not appropriate for a multiracial society where Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing population and Hispanic- Americans will soon surpass African-Americans as the largest minority. But Wilkinson fears that increased diversity has simply multiplied the racial fault lines in this country, and he dreads what he sees as the continuing evolution of a contentious society where race becomes a ``premier civic credential.'' He notes with real alarm the fading of the integrative ideal that once lived in the hearts of most black Americans. He also says that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 has become ``a runaway train of racial separation'' and argues against the entrenchment of what he views as a system of racial shares and entitlements in affirmative-action policy. In the most illuminating sections of the book, however, Wilkinson describes how his father's generation of enlightened men among Richmond's great white city fathers inadequately faced the leadership challenge of stemming the resistance that welled up in response to Brown v. Board of Education and the prospect of school integration. Wilkinson clearly doesn't want his own generation of establishment leaders to be found wanting in the same ways, but he still finds it difficult not to underplay the reality of white domination and its restrictions. Consequently, he circles around and then disappointingly evades the critical question: If ethnic separatism threatens America, whose separatism is it anyway, and what do we do about it?
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-201-18072-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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
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
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