An illumination and critique of a commercial culture that distorts reality for gain.
In this brief but smoldering tract, a psychologist deconstructs contemporary advertising as psychologically perverse, endlessly manipulative, deceitful, and ubiquitous.
Koob (Two Years in Kingston Town, 2002) succinctly describes how advertising and its equally out-of-control cohort, public relations, strive to mold behavior. He tells of how they use techniques of propaganda—and in fact become propaganda—in order to sell products, points of view, political candidates, and anything else, up to and including war. “As a psychologist, it disturbs me greatly to see that our society’s primary, systematic application of the principles of psychology has been as a tool for commercial and political persuasion and for the manipulation of behavior in the service of commerce,” he writes. He delineates these techniques of persuasion and shows, in a somewhat limited way, how they’re applied in ads that play on feelings of love, fear, anger, and other emotions that advertisers think will trigger purchases. Some readers may suspect early on that this heartfelt argument belabors the obvious. In truth, few people could fail to perceive how advertisers, with their psychology-driven bag of tricks, are encroaching ever further into common spaces, including the Internet. But Koob’s competently written, highly readable primer on how the culture came to this awful point would certainly be instructive to a younger audience that is growing up in a time when the $130 billion advertising industry is running at full tilt and slick ads are promoted as entertainment. Who could gainsay his recommendation that every student be taught how to recognize and resist this ceaseless assault? His plea for enforcement of “a strict truth-in-advertising law with teeth” appears equally worthy. Yet neither seems likely to happen, and mass manipulation through advertising in the interest of earning profits doesn’t appear on most lists of common public concerns. One is left to hit the mute button, avert one’s eyes, and swat away ads as one would mosquitoes. Quite clearly, Koob doesn’t believe that’s nearly enough.
An illumination and critique of a commercial culture that distorts reality for gain.Pub Date: March 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-5891-5
Page Count: 196
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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