An idealistic vision of the American university as a place of free thought and socially responsible teaching.
No ivory tower.
Bollinger, the former president of the University of Michigan and Columbia University, has long argued for the power of diversity in higher education and for the autonomy of colleges and universities from political manipulation. Recent assaults on that autonomy provoke this brief, forceful book. Its “intellectual basis” is the First Amendment: Speech is free, and this freedom stands behind the unique status of American universities as sites of protected inquiry. Bollinger has, by his own admission, an idealist’s view of his home institutions. He writes, “Universities are intended to preserve and advance knowledge about the human condition, about life and the natural world, and to pass human knowledge and the capacities to pursue it on to succeeding generations.” Nothing about that sentence, he admits, is straightforward. What is knowledge? What is preservation and advancement? He shows that these are categories always up for debate, always contested and changing. The university must be open to the public, full of teachers with the temperament to share and listen, rich in research that can be, potentially, accessible to all. And yet, freedom is not unconstrained. Just because you have a Ph.D. and tenure does not mean that you can say anything you want at any time. Freedom comes with responsibility, and in the end this book is more a sermon on the latter than a call for the former. “Every single day, universities make judgments in accord with scholarly standards and scholarly temperament about what the nation and the world needs. We should embrace and acknowledge this role.” Those judgments may not always be right, but they should never be rash. Bollinger’s university emerges as a place of thoughtful conversation with a social mission and self-regulating financial independence. Would that it could last.
An idealistic vision of the American university as a place of free thought and socially responsible teaching.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9781324124313
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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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