A sharp and surprising dissertation that puts the many facets of shame in a whole new light.
An intellectually stimulating discussion of shame and its enduring place in the digital age.
It’s been a long time since Hester Prynne was forced to wear the scarlet letter around town, but shame has never left us. Jacquet (Environmental Studies/New York Univ.) uses lively prose and keen insight to explore the myriad ways the shame game continues to impact our everyday lives. Unlike the dark, secret interiors of guilt, shame is often a communal experience, an important way for society to discourage behavior it deems undesirable. Whether publishing the names of heavyweight tax dodgers online or exposing the nefarious moneymaking schemes of the giant telecoms, shame can work wonders on transgressors in need of an immediate course correction. However, as Jacquet also cautions, shame is an often unwieldy instrument that carries the potential of backfiring on those endeavoring to correct unwanted actions. The author looks at examples involving environmental conservation and overfishing, among others, to make the point. In both instances, instead of being shamed into changing behavior, the most egregious offenders somehow managed to slip through the cracks while far less significant offenders were held fast. Jacquet tackles “green guilt” head-on when she explodes the very first recommendation at the end of An Inconvenient Truth and its appeal to buy energy-efficient appliances and light bulbs. As she reminds us, “household lighting accounts for only 2 percent of total U.S. carbon emissions and 6 percent of household energy use (excluding diet).” While there are judges out there who gleefully revel in literally hanging shaming signs around the necks of hard-pressed shoplifters and the like, Jacquet demonstrates a much greater understanding of shame when she likens it to an antibiotic whose effectiveness depends a lot on whether the proper dose is used at the right time.
A sharp and surprising dissertation that puts the many facets of shame in a whole new light.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0307907578
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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