A pleasantly discursive and anecdotally informative light meditation on the ``profound, almost magical, but often unacknowledged significance'' of names. The husband-and-wife team of biographer Kaplan (Walt Whitman: A Life, 1980, etc.) and novelist Bernays (Professor Romeo, 1989, etc.) canvass the importance of naming, from Adam's labeling of creation to the artificially concocted trademarks of the contemporary Namelab, a San Francicobased company that came up with product tags like ``Acura'' and ``Compaq.'' Although naming is a universal phenomenon, the authors concentrate on North America, where there has been historically more room for innovation and confusion. The colorful, odd, or startling names given many of the nation's localities are as diverse as the more problematic renamings of its immigrant population. For example, the curiously named Judge Learned Hand opined in the case of the Selwyn film company against Samuel Goldfish (a.k.a. Schmuel Gelbfisz) that ``a self-made man may prefer a self-made name,'' and allowed the defendant to call himself Samuel Goldwyn. The cultural and transliterative difficulties of Eastern Europeans seem almost negligible when compared to those of African-Americans (or blacks, Negroes, etc.), who wrestle with the dilemma of established ``slave'' names as opposed to adoptive pan-African patronymics. Changing names is almost mandatory in some professions, especially the film industry, where Gladys Smith became Mary Pickford. In the literary world, authors like Dickens (first called Boz) and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) took as much trouble with their noms de plume as with their characters. While they deftly sample a smorgasbord of nomenclature, the authors are slightly less adept in extracting significance, such as psychological meanings and social usages, from the matter of naming. But unpacking what's in a name, especially in America, makes for an inexhaustible and entertaining subject for Kaplan and Bernays.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-80741-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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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