Some readers will find Cohen’s writing too disparate and snarky, but for those comfortable with the Vollmann/Gass/Eggers...
Cohen (Moving Kings, 2017, etc.), selected as a Granta Best Young American Novelist, has been turning out big, daunting novels, and this collection of his journalistic pieces rivals them in scope and density.
As he writes in a short preface, people today are way too distracted: “We’re becoming too disparate, too dissociated—searching for porn one moment, searching for genocide the next—leaving behind stray data that cohere only in the mnemotech of our surveillance.” It’s time to pay attention, and reading these often challenging and acute essays is a start. Cohen opens with a nostalgic piece on the demise of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which felt like the “death of jazz, or the death of the blues.” Then, it’s off to Atlantic City, where he once had a summer job in a casino, and a “cotton-candy-haired clown who crashed the AC party late and left it early and ugly”—Donald Trump. Next up is a piece critical of Bernie Sanders, soon followed by one on a favorite writer of Cohen’s, Thomas Pynchon, and news of a new book by him. Then Cohen discusses the “deliriously acquisitive music of John Zorn,” Aretha Franklin (“like Annie Oakley, she could hit anything”), Beyoncé, and Glenn Greenwald’s “decent” Edward Snowden, who “excoriated the surveillance state.” Throughout the collection, Cohen displays impressive range. He’s equally comfortable discussing philosophy, politics, German metaphysics, Anna Kavan, Georges Perec, Mario Vargas Llosa, the internet, and Google—not to mention creating an abecedarium honoring Paris’ rogue English-language publisher Obelisk. Jewishness, so prevalent in Cohen’s fiction, is generously represented here as well. Sometimes overly stylistically pyrotechnic, the author refuses to wear his learning lightly, which occasionally stifles and snuffs out the good stuff.
Some readers will find Cohen’s writing too disparate and snarky, but for those comfortable with the Vollmann/Gass/Eggers school of writing, these essays are the cat’s meow.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59021-4
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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