An empathetic look at a community forging its future as it keeps a tenuous hold on its past.
The struggles of a town in transition reveal ongoing changes in American life.
Making his literary debut, journalist Lingan creates a tender, elegiac portrait of Winchester, Virginia, the Shenandoah town where Patsy Cline made her debut and where honky-tonk—a rueful brand of country music—rang out in working-class dance halls, bars, and clubs. Honky-tonk, writes the author, “is the genre of heartaches, setbacks, and lonely, regret-filled nights. Honky-tonk country is the sound of rural-rooted people taking their first difficult, stumbling steps toward the city, and it is not often the music of triumph.” Jim McCoy, the singer/songwriter who first put Cline on the air and who played guitar for many of her performances, is one of several residents Lingan profiles as he reveals “the never-ending American fight between commerce and culture” experienced by Winchester as it aspired to achieve “tourist-trap respectability” after its demise as the flourishing apple-growing center of the country. McCoy, who had been a popular entertainer, never attained Cline’s success. By the time Lingan met him, he owned a local nightclub where he hosted karaoke and held a summer barbecue featuring smoked meat, a potluck smorgasbord, and a roster of hopeful local performers. Cline’s former home, on the other hand, was turned into a museum, and the town celebrates her in an annual festival. “Patsy,” writes the author, “is the patron saint of people who feel kicked to the curb.” Those people still live in Winchester; those in the lowest economic strata are barely subsisting, with rising real estate prices, health care costs, and intrusive gentrification posing often insurmountable challenges. At McCoy’s summer barbecue, a donation basket collects neighbors’ contributions for his and his wife’s medical bills. At the same time, hefty funding has turned Old Town Winchester into a walking mall, with espresso bars and sleek restaurants. Lingan resists romanticizing Winchester’s rural past; yet, he admits, modernization, change, and loss “is the most American song of all.”
An empathetic look at a community forging its future as it keeps a tenuous hold on its past.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-93253-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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