Demography and graphic design meet in an extraordinarily revealing book.
An eye-opening visual look at the assumptions and trends that lie beneath how the modern world ticks.
In 2019, writes geographer Cheshire, the FAA tracked 11.2 million commercial flights over U.S. airspace. That’s an astonishing number. More astonishing is the fact that this number was only a modest increase over 2009, yet during that decade, passenger numbers had grown by a third. This suggests that those additional millions of passengers were packed like sardines inside those planes, which “seemed like a good strategy until the pandemic.” Working with former National Geographic designer Uberti, Cheshire serves up revealing data about the modern world, his eye set on patterns that illustrate changes in our time. For instance, the authors track the signals sent from mobile phones to monitor migration patterns, which figure into a body of statistical and visual data that “illustrate how a warming planet affects everything from hurricanes to the hajj.” Eschewing what mathematician Edward Tufte calls “chartjunk,” Cheshire and Uberti look with admirable clarity at other patterns over time. One map, for instance, depicts the number of “vagrancy houses” made available in Cheshire’s native England to the homeless a century ago. The program involved removing these people from London, but at least they had somewhere to go, even if that somewhere amounted to “holding pens.” With economic decline and social change, the number of such people has mounted today, even as 216,000 houses sat vacant across the country. Using such data to point to a problem and a solution at once, Cheshire asks, “Why not make the housing permanent?” In a work that brilliantly demonstrates how big data and its visual representation can be put to work, the authors analyze the shift from rural to urban residence across the world, the mixed-race DNA that most of us carry without necessarily knowing it, the connections of rivers to commerce, and many other matters of compelling interest.
Demography and graphic design meet in an extraordinarily revealing book.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-393-65151-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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