A passionately argued jeremiad about an era and its lingering effects on politics and culture.
A film critic looks back at the movies of the Ronald Reagan years.
The 1980s was an era in which one of the most popular American TV shows, Family Ties, featured a teenager “who wears a tie, carries a briefcase, and has a poster of Richard Nixon in his bedroom,” a program that was reportedly one of the president’s favorites. In this book, the last in his Found Illusions trilogy, Hoberman (An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, 2011, etc.) examines some of the most popular films from Reagan’s eight years in office to view how politics affected popular culture and vice versa. The author covers everything from paeans to the capitalism that Reagan—who “understood that stardom was the ultimate form of public service: the Department of Amusement”—dearly espoused, films such as Risky Business and Trading Places to the Vietnam revisionism of the Rambo movies to pictures like Ghostbusters and Gremlins, which, by “dramatizing instances of alien aggression,” barely concealed their xenophobia. Even readers who share Hoberman’s distaste for Reagan—the book includes long excoriations he wrote for the Village Voice—may think he occasionally lets his contempt get the better of him. It may have been a “bravura performance” when Reagan waved to cameras as he left the hospital after having been shot two weeks earlier, but, unlike many of his other performances, that seems a reasonable one to have made. Constant references to the films Reagan watched as president grow tiresome. Much better are passages that show the president mirroring behavior of movie characters, as when Hoberman notes that one of Reagan’s first-term speeches on economic recovery sounded as facile as the utterances of TV-obsessed Chance the gardener, the simpleton from Being There—one of the book’s many sly digs that apply as much to Donald Trump as to Reagan.
A passionately argued jeremiad about an era and its lingering effects on politics and culture.Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59558-006-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: April 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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