An educational, accessible diatribe grounded in decades of accumulated knowledge, and certainly well-intended.
A 50-year veteran of market research contradicts the conventional wisdom about the importance of targeting consumers under 35, while simultaneously scolding advertisers and media executives for corrupting American society.
Bogart is a sociologist from the University of Chicago who spent much of his career at the Newspaper Advertising Bureau. He is upset that producers of broadcast television, cable television, Hollywood movies, popular music, video games, Internet sites, and other mass media promote what he believes to be gratuitous violence and casual sex to the extent that many audience members are desensitized at home, scared of the world outside their door, tempted to use violence against alleged tormentors, or worse. Bogart is doubly upset that the production values are based on what he says is the mistaken notion that violence and sex are effective in selling material goods to what is usually termed the 18-to-34 age group. The evidence that violence and sex sell stuff is mixed at best, Bogart says. And the generalization that consumers in that highly targeted age group will retain brand loyalty during later decades is downright unsupportable. While questioning the assumptions of advertisers and content producers, and holding them partially responsible for decreasing social civility and increasing crime rates, Bogart has not lost sight of their talent. He simply wants them to employ it differently. He believes that the initiative to do that will have to come from within each industry, because governments are too beholden to the media industries and too constrained by the First Amendment to play a major reform role. Also, self-regulation by the producers from industry to industry is counterproductive, as in the example of an R or an NC-17 movie rating causing young people to desire more greatly to come in, not stay away. A return to more civil norms by the producers themselves is the only effective answer.
An educational, accessible diatribe grounded in decades of accumulated knowledge, and certainly well-intended.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56663-633-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
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
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
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