Lightweight though often entertaining reflections on an obsession with beauty. Once a homely teenager, Siman (Pizza Face, 1991) is now a gay man obsessed with physical beauty. With his long-nosed friend, Dorothy, a lesbian Playboy editor, he embarks on a ``trip'' into the world of beauty as a way of resolving old feelings of exclusion. Along the way, Siman encounters the beautiful (female bodybuilder Lenda Murray; Playboy ``student bodies'' Amanda and Kelly; supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford) and their creators (plastic surgeons, photographers, and model-agency doyenne Eileen Ford—who notes forthrightly that modeling is about money, as well as about dreams). Many of the interviews are funny, especially one with Sy Sperling, president of the Hair Club for Men, which sells hair replacement systems; Sperling says he didn't give money to New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani's last campaign because ``I don't want to promote a guy who is promoting the bald or covered look...I don't want people thinking this guy is a client.'' Siman also brings us through some of his own (not wholly successful) attempts to rid his face of acne scarring: silicone injections, dermabrasions, and a chemical peel (one doctor considers wrinkles a deformity). He has a lively style and is at his best when flippant, pointing out, for example, that straight, white-collar men didn't go to the gym until recently because they were afraid that muscles would make them look either working-class or gay. However, Siman's journey doesn't appear to have yielded any important ideas or provocative conclusions; indeed, wherever he attempts profundity, his prose gets murky, and some of his assumptions—that there is an objective standard of beauty, that the young are almost always more attractive than the old—are both conventional and downright silly. Underlying the tongue-in-cheek tone is the sense that Siman takes beauty all too seriously.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-89080-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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