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THE ANNOTATED MIXTAPE

Harmon’s dedication as a collector will be appreciated by any audiophile, but his essays lack cohesion and continuity,...

An obsessive record collector’s personal essays categorized by song.

Harmon’s (Scape, 2009, etc.) opening essay is a paean to the life of a collector, a life he recognizes for its obsessive tendencies that align him with other collectors equally impulsive and pathological about their habit (he owns more than 4,000 vinyl records). Like any serious collector, the author occasionally gives the impression of pretension or snobbery—he openly admits this tendency—but his taste is varied and eclectic enough to spare the label from sticking. The opening serves as an introduction of sorts, but it does little to set up the following essays, as readers are thrust into Harmon’s peculiar format and style without any substantial statement about his project. Each essay is dedicated to a song or two that serves as a metaphor or theme for Harmon’s musings. For instance, the author uses Section 25’s “Trident” as a platform to discuss Reagan-era nuclear proliferation and the Soviet Union. There is never any definitive connection, however, between the band’s choice of “Trident” as a song name in 1982 and the creation of the Trident II missile in 1981, other than coincidence. This type of associative connection is common in Harmon’s essays, which have more to do with feeling and memory than argument. Harmon is often sentimental as he rhapsodizes about his home state of Massachusetts in several chapters, naturally referencing the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” his childhood love of early U2 and his distaste for Bauhaus. He even waxes on the uniquely ephemeral quality of music that makes it more prone to wistfulness than other art forms. Ultimately, the personal nature of these essays often makes them feel more like journal entries and fails to synthesize an overarching narrative or argument.

Harmon’s dedication as a collector will be appreciated by any audiophile, but his essays lack cohesion and continuity, making the collection feel too insular.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014

ISBN: 978-1936873241

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dzanc

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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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

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WHEN BREATH BECOMES AIR

A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...

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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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