Here, Tiger (Anthropology/Rutgers; The Manufacture of Evil, 1987, etc.) offers observations on our seeking of pleasure and its prehistoric roots. ``Pleasure matters,'' Tiger asserts. ``The subject is hot.'' Aiming to catch the drift of the 90's, he contends that ``pleasure is an evolutionary entitlement.'' Food, sex, drugs, power, and, more interestingly, bearing children ``are as much related to our history as a species and products of it as they are products of our invention,'' he convincingly argues. The taste for sugar, for instance, was critical to primitive gatherers in sorting out what and what not to eat. But today the craving for sweets has outlived its function, and the pleasure derived from refined sugar carries a price. On the other hand, Tiger explains, power gives humans and primates chemically measurable physiological ``benefits.'' The author advocates ``a balance sheet of fun as well as an agenda of function,'' and claims that generally governmental ``censors are in fact violating a law of nature.'' Yet, he's against legalizing drugs because ``the human central pleasure system is too avid, too frail.'' Tiger's attempt to speak to a broad audience means that what information he provides comes in the form of cutely titled (``That Old Gang Rape of Mine,'' ``Ear, Ear''), rambling passages. Moreover, his countless personal references offer little more than a series of dropped names (Avignon, Bordeaux, and Siena as ``midsize ambitious dining towns''). Nor does the slapdash writing style help (``The bounteous body seems more desirable to men, and not only in industrial societies, either''). Certainly, Tiger's stated ambition ``to assert and establish the moral, scientific, and political authority of pleasure'' proves far too broad and too complex. Pleasure? Look elsewhere for thoughts grounded in the ice-cold wake of a decade during which there seemed no shortage of those pursuing their ``entitlement'' of pleasure.
Pub Date: Jan. 24, 1992
ISBN: 0-316-84543-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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