From Whittier, Alaska, to Williston, North Dakota, to Palm Coast, Florida, these varied essays offer compelling snapshots of...
In these 37 singular essays, some reading like research papers, others as personal as memoirs, n+1 editor Gessen (All the Sad Young Literary Men, 2008, etc.) and Harvard graduate student Squibb find in certain American cities the crucible of enormous change since the financial meltdown of 2008.
In “Lessons of the Arkansas,” Ben Merriman wisely considers the hugely troubling ramifications of diverting rivers such as the mighty Arkansas for the irrigation of arid land. Dan Albert’s “The Highway and the City” finds the interstate structure both a product of wrongheaded urban renewal and a “transcendent” step in technological progress. In “The Office and the City,” Nikil Saval, author of Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace (2014), looks at how the once-ubiquitous office towers of New York, San Francisco, and other metropolises face conversion rather than obsolescence. Two of the chapters are interviews: historian Gar Alperovitz explores how Cleveland has become a model for worker-owned, multistakeholder institutions that anchor the community and distribute wealth more equally. City Life/Vida Urbana organizer and activist Steve Meacham shares his methods of helping advocate for tenants’ rights in Boston against foreclosures. Some of the more amusing essays are highly quirky reminiscences of living or growing up in certain cities—e.g., Annie Wyman’s ferocious “Dallas and the Park Cities,” which chronicles her move to this “dark heart of Republican power” as a child and feeling appalled by its racist tones; and Ryann Liebenthal’s “The Making of Local Boise,” which finds a charm in the “little anthills of aesthetic and cultural kinship” popping up in his hometown. Other contributors include Michelle Tea, Jenny Hendrix, and James Pogue.
From Whittier, Alaska, to Williston, North Dakota, to Palm Coast, Florida, these varied essays offer compelling snapshots of how Americans live, move, and work.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-86547-831-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Faber & Faber/n +1 Foundation/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
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