An engaging series of glimpses into the minds and priorities of kids in San Francisco.
An unusual collection offers interviews with California schoolchildren.
In her unconventional nonfiction debut, Burke compiles interviews with a group of San Francisco school kids on a broad array of subjects. The author presents these interviews as fleshed-out profiles, providing readers with short biographical details about each of her interviewees, stitching their responses into a conversational narrative. Burke follows each piece with a selection of discussion questions clearly aimed at children roughly the same age as the kids described in the book. Readers meet youngsters like 9-year-old Silas, who likes living in San Francisco but thinks parts of it are a bit “sketchy.” He appreciates the fact that the city isn’t “cold” like Washington, D.C. (readers from the Midwest and New England will wince a bit), which prompts the discussion question: “Would you rather visit a hot or cold weather place, and why?” The author also presents 9-year-old Lilah, who lives in the Castro District and loves soccer (her favorite thing about the sport is the teamwork). This sparks the discussion question: “If you play soccer, or if you ever did play, do you think it would be more fun to run around or defend your team’s goal, and why?” And readers encounter 6-year-old Eliza, who likes San Francisco, particularly its birds—she loves to chirp to them. (“Do you talk to birds?” the discussion question goes. “And if so, do you tweet at them or say something else?”) These enjoyable profiles are uniformly charming and unguarded peeks into the worlds and minds of kids in one city, and the discussion questions are general enough to be very useful in leading to fun conversations with similarly aged children. But by restraining to such a marked degree from editorializing, Burke misses an opportunity to make the lively book even more captivating for her adult readers, many of whom will want more context about the kids’ lives and environments. Still, the direct voices of these children are quite intriguing in their own right.
An engaging series of glimpses into the minds and priorities of kids in San Francisco.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68463-016-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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