A disappointingly superficial approach to a potentially rewarding topic.
Schaefer’s breezy survey examines the dilemmas facing Americans in their 30s.
The author of Text Me When You Get Home, now in her 40s, discusses her own experiences and those of seven other men and women, "all part of today's sprawling middle class,” as they face five life transitions that in earlier times often occurred significantly earlier in one’s life span. These include completing school, leaving home, marrying, becoming financially independent, and having a child. Schaefer, who began this book before the pandemic, touches briefly on its role in slowing these achievements down, but she focuses primarily on pre-pandemic life. The author occasionally refers to other books, generally pop sociology like Gaily Sheehy’s Passages or Jill Filipovic’s The H Spot, and quotes celebrities like Jennifer Aniston, but she pays most attention to documenting the lives of herself and her subjects. While these anecdotes are entertaining, in occasionally uncomfortable ways, the individuals that Schaefer profiles are hardly representative of the range of 30-something experience. Two are stand-up comedians attempting to find success in Los Angeles, sometimes relying on money from their parents; another quit a stable job to pursue entrepreneurship; one is a stay-at-home father writing a novel. Alongside their stories, Schaefer chronicles her own familiar struggles within the 21st-century journalism landscape. Most of her subjects are impetuous—e.g., using a $10,000 loan to go on a spending spree or saying things like, "Let's be irresponsible with it. Let's go to Italy”—which means little reader sympathy for their plights even as they attempt to take risks and follow their dreams. While a book about delayed adulthood in the U.S. could be useful, this one covers such a narrow spectrum of individuals that it's difficult to extrapolate any meaningful conclusions from their experiences. By contrast, Sheehy’s book included interviews with 115 people.
A disappointingly superficial approach to a potentially rewarding topic.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4483-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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