Schmidt (Religion/Drew Univ.; Holy Fairs, not reviewed) traces the cultural and commercial history of American holidays with some surprising results. Christmas gift-giving pumps some $37 billion into the American economy every year, a figure greater than the gross national product of Ireland. About 150 million Mother's Day cards are sent annually. In short, holidays are big business in America, and many people are not too pleased about it. Schmidt focuses his attention primarily on showing how the commercial grinch crept into the picture in American celebrations of St. Valentine's Day, Christmas, Easter, and Mother's Day. However, he argues that the apparent taint of commerce is, in reality, as much in keeping with the ``festal excess'' at the heart of the notion of festivity as any religious recognition of these days, and can be traced in many cases back to the medieval period, when fairs and markets were common on feast days. He shows convincingly that the battle over the holidays in America is rooted not in recent commercialism, but in the fundamental difference between the somber Puritan and more indulgent Anglican/Catholic visions of religion. His argument founders, however, when he asserts that the excesses of American capitalism are in some way tied into the ``carnivalesque''—the term used by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin to connote bawdy, insurrectionary humor—mistaking mercantile vulgarity for Rabelaisian subversion. In general, his defense of holiday commercialism is not entirely convincing, but he offers a fascinating picture of key changes in American celebration, from a bewildering variety of antebellum Santas to quick biographies of Joyce Hall, father of Hallmark Greeting Cards, and Anna Jarvis, the creator of Mother's Day. Although the central argument of the book remains unproven, this is an enlightening and entertaining look at a relatively undiscussed aspect of American culture, particularly interesting for its insights into 19th-century mores.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-691-02980-6
Page Count: 358
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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