Neither a nuanced political analysis nor a typical comedian’s laughfest.
Give fists a chance.
As a boyhood veteran of the Sacramento punk scene, Jensen became uncomfortably familiar with white supremacy before it began veering toward mainstream acceptability. In this scattered collection of polemics, broadsides, stand-up routines, social commentary, and personal anecdotes, the street-wise author and comedian mainly leads with his heart. His heart tells him that racism is wrong, wrong enough to deserve a punch in the nose whenever one encounters it. However, he notes early on, “full disclosure; I’ve never punched a Nazi. This is my great shame.” Regardless, Jensen supports those who do, even if he admits that sometimes those folks are just looking for a brawl. Take his ambivalence toward a group that some readers might not know: “The SHARPS, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice.” You have to be up on your cultural codes and tribes to understand that shaved “skinheads” originally embraced everything about Jamaica: the culture, the rhythms, the black musicians—until the shorn style was adopted by militant white racists who transformed that culture into their stomping grounds. Hence the SHARPS, who represent a rejection of that racist stereotype and a return to the original ethos—ostensibly. A club promoter suggested to the author that they weren’t really effective anti-Nazi warriors but rather “just dudes who wanted to fight. They cloaked it in some kind of ideal but they were just dudes who wanted to fight.” Jensen admits to his own ambivalence: “I didn’t like a lot of the SHARPS, and I loved several of them,” before concluding, “whatever other issues I may have had with them, I will always admire them for their Nazi punching. Well done, crew, well done.” His sentiment toward Antifa—the aggressive anti-fascist protestors—is similar: “If you think Antifa groups are as bad as Nazis, please stop being the right’s tool.” This is a book about right and wrong, and if right stops wrong with a punch, so much the better.
Neither a nuanced political analysis nor a typical comedian’s laughfest.Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-3374-9
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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