A fit of nostalgia and self-aggrandizement disguised as a generational call to arms.
The author launched his career as a social critic with a much-discussed Details essay that asked, “Has Generation X Already Peaked?” Here’s the answer (no), now bloated to book length.
According to Gordinier, without Gen X’s contributions to music, art, film, sociology and, most importantly, technology, society would be a vastly different place. That’s a reasonable response to loud critics who have called X the “slacker generation.” It’s also almost as obvious and amorphous as the author’s broader thesis that just as past generations have defined their eras, so too has X defined ours. Gordinier undermines his defense with a meandering argument that reads like a lengthy self-applied pat on the back. The many pop references, carefully selected so his peers will be sure to get them, are not notable for their shrewd insights. The author apparently thinks Kurt Cobain was the first rock star ever to be overwhelmed by the misery of sudden fame. He likens Paris Hilton to the bad kids in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (the 1971 movie, that is, from which “vast numbers of Generation Xers learned all their moral lessons”). He treats us to the hot-off-the-presses revelation that Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking is shaped not by a graduate degree, but by all those movies the director-to-be watched while working in a video store. Given Gordinier’s inability to move beyond his own tastes, accomplishments and even angst, it’s not too surprising that the misleading opening section, “Quick First-Person Tangent,” takes up more than half of the book. The author is actually a decent representative for the generation he seeks to defend: He traveled to Prague on a whim to take part in the Velvet Revolution and eschewed graduate school to become a rock journalist. Unfortunately, his disproportionate attention to his own memories skews his project.
A fit of nostalgia and self-aggrandizement disguised as a generational call to arms.Pub Date: March 31, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01858-1
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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