Readable and rewarding and, though more than a touch old-fashioned, full of exemplary reporting.
An anthology of New Yorker stories form a living bridge to journalism’s golden age—which, as it happens, wasn’t all that long ago.
Ross, no relation to legendary editor Harold Ross, began working at the magazine in 1944. She was paid less than any male counterpart, but she was lucky to have the job, since said editor had a strong aversion to women reporters to begin with and hired them only when World War II took the men away to battle. Ross the reporter had a less frightful mentor in managing editor William Shawn, who paid her the same as the men and stuck up for her when she turned in a controversial piece about the Miss America contest, open to all young women who were “high school graduates, were not and had never been married, and were not Negroes.” Score one for the author, who closes her introduction with an old-fashioned manifesto that many modern practitioners will ignore or puzzle over—to wit, write only about people who want to be written about, and don’t use what she charmingly calls a “tape recorder.” Some of the entries have a fustiness that cannot survive the passing years, and some are nearly parodic in sounding just like what a New Yorker human-interest piece is supposed to sound like: “Eastwood’s appearance in the kitchen, where Paco the parrot greeted him with repeated I love yous, didn’t seem to slow down the lunch preparations that were under way.” Some are classics, however, including her much-anthologized piece on John Huston’s travails in making the 1951 film The Red Badge of Courage. It’s worth noting that Ross is writing for the magazine today, though the anthology tilts heavily in favor of work that appeared before anyone ever heard of Tina Brown or Jill Lepore, the latter of whom Ross singles out for praise.
Readable and rewarding and, though more than a touch old-fashioned, full of exemplary reporting.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1600-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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