Blunt, essential reading on today's Appalachia that is less elegiac and more forward-thinking than most.
A collection of on-the-ground reporting from one of the country’s most misunderstood and misrepresented regions.
Before the 2016 election, Donald Trump promised Appalachians that the coal-mining industry would come roaring back; since then, it remains on life support thanks to competing energy sources hammering a business that, for its workers, is economically and literally toxic. In Hillbilly Elegy (2016), J.D. Vance blamed the region’s woes on lack of initiative among its residents, but a host of unique pressures trap the area in poverty. Such clarity comes thanks to the reporting of Ohio Valley ReSource, a media collective launched in 2016 by seven public media outlets in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia. This book, drawn from the collective’s reporting and overseen by Young, its managing editor, shows how mining companies have dodged taxes and fines while polluting the region and eluding blame for the illnesses their practices have caused; how exploitative pharmaceutical companies bred the opioid epidemic; and how efforts to launch retraining and revitalization programs tend to disappoint: “How do you bring in people and businesses if you can’t promise them a clean glass of water?” one story concludes. But while the articles paint stark portraits of the region’s troubles, the reporting team doesn’t indulge in ruin-porn clichés about the region; rather, they deliver profiles of people shouldering ahead despite governmental and corporate missteps—e.g., farmers making an uneasy transition into hemp farming and activist efforts to better hold mining companies accountable. The reporting doesn’t aspire to flashy style or epic sweep—the articles are modeled after Sunday-newspaper features—the plainspoken reporting grabs the attention. Bemoaning the newfound emphasis on fracking, one man laments: “I don’t understand why fossil fuel extraction is the only kind of job this area is offered. We want jobs that won’t kill us.”
Blunt, essential reading on today's Appalachia that is less elegiac and more forward-thinking than most.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982148-86-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tiller Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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