An astute examination of loneliness and isolation that sheds light, finds humor, and provides hope.
A cultural anthropologist offers his take on America’s self-reliant culture.
According to Richardson, some key traits lodged in the American ethos, such as self-reliance and maintaining privacy, seem positive but have contributed to increasing widespread isolation; trauma lessens when burdens are shared as a group, but too often Americans are expected to find their own solutions. Sally, a participant in the author’s study, is a nurse mourning the tragic death of her sister. (Richardson uses research gleaned from a sampling of older Americans aged 45-74.) Her co-workers ignored Sally’s unhappiness until her volatile emotions began to affect her job performance. By comparison, Richardson’s adopted South Indian community (he spent time in the region conducting fieldwork as a student) gave immediate “comfort and censure” to a man who had developed a drinking problem, seeing his issue as the group’s responsibility. Family ties in modern America are weak and distant compared to earlier time periods and other cultures, the author asserts. Canada’s Nêhiyawak people have 17 terms related to varieties of cousins; in the U.S., most people have little contact with any cousins at all. Richardson observes that even minor-seeming issues, such as the ways we eat and have fun, contribute to societal disconnection. With abundant specialized diets (e.g., gluten-free or vegan) available to them and unlimited access to snacks, family members and friends often eat separately rather than sharing meal times. Recreation is a healthy respite from work, but the idea of fun has shifted—rather than involving social interactions, amusement now often falls to streaming platforms like Netflix, viewed alone. Richardson effectively uses humor and personal anecdotes—his dad becomes an ongoing joke—and the book’s charts and graphs are mostly easy to read. The author’s message that we need more collectivism to be healthy again is daunting for an individualistic society, but Richardson also provides glimmers of hope; for example, Gen Z seems to be a more collaborative generation than its predecessors, and Americans are seeking mental health treatment more often.
An astute examination of loneliness and isolation that sheds light, finds humor, and provides hope.Pub Date: May 17, 2024
ISBN: 9798988768005
Page Count: 434
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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
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