A spirited, often entertaining rant against things as they are.
When did Americans come to shun reality? When did the American experiment become a congeries of solipsisms?
“As I pass by fish in barrels,” writes Studio 360 host Andersen (True Believers, 2012, etc.) at the outset of this entertaining tour of American irreality, “I will often shoot them.” Indeed he does, but then, as writers as various as H.L. Mencken and Christopher Hitchens long ago discovered, American society offers endless targets. Andersen finds a climacteric in Karl Rove’s pronouncement, a dozen years ago, that those people who live in “the reality-based community” need to understand that “that’s not the way the world really works anymore.” True enough: Andersen closes with the rise of Trump-ism and its “critical mass of fantasy and lies” that is in danger of becoming “something much worse than nasty, oafish, reality-show pseudoconservatism.” It’s not just the Trumpies who are ruining things for everyone; by the author’s account, the nice liberals who refuse to vaccinate their children are as much a part of the problem as those who flock to creation museums and megachurches. All are waystations of Andersen’s “Fantasyland,” an assemblage not just of scattered false beliefs, but whole lifestyles cobbled from them, which lands us in the 1960s and its ethos: “Do your own thing, find your own reality, it’s all relative.” It’s not, but that’s where we are today, at least by Andersen’s account, though he hastens to add that approving nods to political correctness are not necessarily the same thing as endorsing perniciousness. Throughout, the author names names—Dr. Oz, for one, won’t be happy, and neither will Oprah—and takes no prisoners, offering incitement for the rest of us to do the same. “We need to become less squishy,” Andersen writes, and instead gird up for some reality-based arguments against the “dangerously untrue and unreal.”
A spirited, often entertaining rant against things as they are.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6721-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
