A good read, popular without being condescending, for students of the modern city and the metropolises of the future.
We are city dwellers, to paraphrase the Whole Earth Catalog, and we might as well get used to it.
Our appeal to the good old days usually looks to the countryside for inspiration. Yet, joining the literature of the new urbanism, British historian Hollis (Stones of London: A History in Twelve Buildings, 2011, etc.) argues that the city is a multifaceted, inexhaustible source of possibility for human achievement. Where others have argued for economic good (cities are engines of innovation and enrichment, à la Lewis Mumford) and cultural and social advancement (cities are where smart people congregate and create things, à la Richard Florida), Hollis opens with an intangible: “It is places like the High Line,” he writes of the newly opened Manhattan park, “that allow us to think again about the city and how it can make us happy.” Happy? Yes, happy, and Hollis does a solid job of showing how cities can buck many of the negative trends that so define the Western world in particular: Don’t like the fact that the United States hasn’t signed the Kyoto Protocol? No matter, Hollis suggests, since “It will be cities…rather than nations, which will be at the forefront of the climate-change challenge, driving initiatives, setting out practical policies and ensuring that they are followed through.” Don’t like the anonymity of the city dweller? Then, Hollis urges, redefine community and create a miniature village within the city where everyone knows everyone else. Hollis’ tone is optimistic but grounded, which is a nice switch from the usual doomsaying of trends analysts. Though he sometimes ventures out onto the scaffolding without much visible support—for instance, for his suggestion that the world’s future mega-regions “will not happen organically” (Why not? They did in the past)—he manages not to plummet to the sidewalk below.
A good read, popular without being condescending, for students of the modern city and the metropolises of the future.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-206-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
PERSPECTIVES
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