American skin, then, is eminently sheddable. Trendspotters will find Wynter’s study fascinating.
Nativists and know-nothings beware: northern European culture is on the decline in America, replaced by a friendly beige.
In the early days of the republic, writes sometime Wall Street Journal columnist Wynter, anyone who was assimilable culturally and ethnically into the nation’s Anglo-Protestant majority was considered, more or less automatically, “white,” with all the privileges appertaining thereunto; others were “presumed permanent outsiders with no legitimate role in the American economic or martial potential, much less the American cultural stock.” This disenfranchising supposition defied the “true transracial nature of America,” of course, and it has lost its power in recent years thanks to a number of cultural forces—not least of them mass music, mass advertising, mass marketing, and mass consumption, through which white culture has been thoroughly integrated to the point that stockbrokers greet each other with cries of “Whassup” and farm kids in North Dakota communicate in rap. Embattled whites who quest for a Leave It to Beaver homeland and who are now abandoning, say, Los Angeles for the woods of Idaho will find that they can run but not hide, Wynter observes; “the Old Majority, if it’s running from the combined presence of blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and others who are not counted as non-Hispanic whites, really has no place to go, except perhaps to a shrinking number of countries in Europe.” Provocative though it may be, Wynters’s grand thesis is less interesting than the data and anecdotes he assembles to support it, as is so often the case in books of pop sociology; of particular interest are his remarks on the inherently commercial nature of hip-hop culture and the cultural assumptions of the “Echo Boomers,” the young people of today, who are now more numerous than the Baby Boomers and who are driving the present culture; for this generation, Wynter writes, race as such has no meaning, and instead “identity is rooted in cultures that can be freely traded in the marketplace, not imposed by race or ethnicity at birth.”
American skin, then, is eminently sheddable. Trendspotters will find Wynter’s study fascinating.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60489-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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