In their current configurations, airports are usually banished to distant places far from the city center—e.g., Dulles...
Where are the flying cars we were promised back in the 1930s? They’re just around the corner—sort of, write Kasarda (Business/Univ. of North Carolina) and journalist Lindsay in this fascinating study.
In their current configurations, airports are usually banished to distant places far from the city center—e.g., Dulles International outside Washington, D.C., which was once way out in the sticks, or the new airport in Shanghai, connected to downtown by bullet trains. In the near term, cities will migrate closer to airfields. The toll-road corridor leading to Dulles, for instance, is now an ultramodern, international business zone, peopled by those who may have never traveled beyond Fairfax County by other conveyance but roam the world in airplanes. In the longer-term future, write the authors, “we will build this century’s cities around [airports]”—our most efficient way of organizing transportation nodes toward a global future. By this logic, customers around the world are more important than those in one’s backyard, while we annihilate distances in a constant war against international competition to be first and fastest to market. Thus the “aerotropolis,” traces of which can be seen in new airports in Korea, anti-examples of which abound in gridlock-bound places such as Heathrow and JFK. Kasarda and Lindsay take rather roundabout journeys to get to some of their points, chatting away about how Zappos and Amazon do business, and larding their discussion with factoids that don’t always have an immediate bearing on the point at hand (for instance, that Facebook users collectively spend the equivalent of 2,700 years each day on the site). Yet their case studies of failures, successes and known unknowns are music to a logistician’s ears: Why, for instance, should so much air traffic now pass through the Persian Gulf? Because the emirates are blank slates for the experiment, and, as one Abu Dhabi–based technologist says, “because we can fly nineteen hours nonstop now, we’re able to reach any city in the world from here.”Pub Date: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-10019-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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
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
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