Calm analysis only highlights the urgency of Roy’s warning that fundamental problems in American culture need to be...
A Virginia Tech faculty member somberly narrates her fruitless attempts to secure counseling for Seung-Hui Cho and examines the implications of his subsequent rampage.
Poet-novelist Roy (The Hotel Alleluia, 2001, etc.) first met Cho in a poetry class in the spring of 2004. A year and a half later, his bizarre writing samples, harangues against other students and harassment of co-eds so alarmed poet Nikki Giovanni that she requested his removal from her class. Roy, at that time the chair of the school’s English Department, met Cho for independent study through the rest of the semester. Written in the present tense and filled with a poet’s mastery of tactile details, her description of these sessions is riveting, balancing sympathy for an anguished soul with horror over his presence. Wearing reflective sunglasses and a baseball cap as if for camouflage, waiting an agonizingly long time to speak, Cho drained energy from the room. Despite her e-mails alerting several Virginia Tech departments to his fragile mental state, and Cho’s attempts to contact the school’s counseling service, the student fell through the cracks. Roy was bewildered by the reaction of Virginia Tech’s administration to the massacre on April 16, 2007, which killed 32 and wounded 26. Overly strict adherence to student privacy laws, she stresses, hindered its response to both the threat posed by Cho and to the commission formed by the governor to investigate the crime. The author also carefully weighs the larger ramifications of the killings. Sorting through recommendations made after the calamity, Roy finds some helpful—for example, the suggestion that threat-assessment teams should be allowed to call high schools to trace troubled students’ histories—and others wanting. Gun prohibitions would not work, she argues, because weapons are ubiquitous. Federal and state budget cuts, the author warns, may further limit the attention school administrations can devote to student well-being.
Calm analysis only highlights the urgency of Roy’s warning that fundamental problems in American culture need to be addressed lest similar tragedies recur.Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-40963-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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
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
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