Not just illustrative and emotive, this pummeling, immersive social text is grounded in street-level reportage and seeded...
White grad student inserts himself into the lives of at-risk black youth in a part of Detroit more postapocalyptic than most.
It’s one thing for social scientists to parachute into bombed-out urban districts and write movingly of the ills they discover, but quite another for Bergmann to note about one of his adolescent subjects that the boy was locked up for possibly shooting someone on a corner “not far from where I lived.” It’s this personal engagement that gives such resonance to his account of several years spent monitoring the lives of two teenage drug dealers. Bergmann met Dude Freeman and Rodney Phelps in 2000 at a Detroit juvenile detention facility where he had “an unpaid internship [that] allowed me virtually free movement through the highly restricted institution.” Though he had little in common with these kids, he easily ingratiated himself and became firmly implanted in their chaotic lives, thanks to a disarming sincerity that is among the text’s most winning traits. Bergmann reports on a fluid world, with a sprawl of poor youth floating in and out of the barely structured drug trade omnipresent in their napalmed neighborhoods; “getting ghost” is the evocative Detroit slang for their elusive movements. Dude is a lesser figure here, skipping out on his family and probation officer not long after being released from detention. Rodney, the kind of low-achieving charmer social workers gravitate toward, does a good job of seducing the mostly clear-eyed Bergmann. By the end, with Rodney facing a murder charge, the author seems oblivious to the fact that his subject is most likely a cold killer. Bergmann backdrops his personal narrative with evocative pocket histories of Detroit’s urban decline and the racial texture of its modern social fabric—the universally Arab and Albanian shop owners, the faraway white suburbs, the tension between poor and middle-class blacks.
Not just illustrative and emotive, this pummeling, immersive social text is grounded in street-level reportage and seeded with wisdom.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59558-139-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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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