Insightful and provocative, but repetitive.
The co-authors of a headline-making 2007 study of college students’ growing self-centeredness take a comprehensive look at the rise of narcissism in American culture and the resulting incivility, exhibitionism and celebrity obsession.
Twenge (Psychology/San Diego State Univ.; Generation Me, 2006) and Campbell (Psychology/Univ. of Georgia; When You Love a Man Who Loves Himself, 2005), draw on a growing body of academic research to offer an analysis of narcissism that goes a long way toward explaining current cultural phenomena, from American Idol to Internet social-networking sites. The authors show how the 1960s emphasis on the greater good morphed into the self-admiration of the ’70s and ’80s, which promoted indulgent parenting, celebrity worship, an obsession with instant fame and a “Look-at-me!” attitude. Noting that the American Psychiatric Association developed a Narcissistic Personality Inventory in the ’80s, the authors stress that their main interest is narcissistic behaviors among normal people that do not merit a clinical diagnosis. Our culture has gone far beyond the good intentions of the self-esteem movement, they argue, too often crossing the line into arrogance and self-centeredness. Narcissism is expressed in materialism (McMansions), self-promotion run amok (YouTube), vapid blogging, too-cute kids’ names, physically intimate but emotionally distant relationships, phoniness in everything from beauty (botox) to fame (faux paparazzi) and a general flight from reality into fantasy. New technologies and the mass media are the enablers of our self-obsession, they write. “It’s as if being famous has become a right,” remarks a sociologist. The authors ground many observations in quantifiable evidence and recognize the difference between useful self-promotion and outright self-absorption. Their suggested remedies are often obvious (education and awareness) or naïve (tell your kids not to watch My Super Sweet 16 on MTV).
Insightful and provocative, but repetitive.Pub Date: April 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-7598-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
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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