A calm, refreshing breath of fresh air in a dangerously uncertain moment in human history.
A wide-ranging analysis of communal joy, including suggestions on how to get it back.
Feminist and activist Segal (Psychology and Gender Studies/Birkbeck Coll.; Making Trouble: Life and Politics, 2008, etc.) dives into the fraught realm of happiness studies and how we balance collective joy with personal fulfillment. “Writing a book on happiness is surely one of the most foolish hostages to fortune I have ever given,” she freely admits in the preface. “Who am I to lay claim to any expertise on the matter?” So begins an expansive and contemplative exploration of love, joy, desire, and the concepts surrounding Utopias, all of which find the author navigating human psychology, sociology, societal mores, and the economics of happiness. Here, she’s really talking about the nexus between our private happiness and the need and desire to share that joy with others, creating a Venn diagram that hovers between the public and the private. Segal’s writing is surprisingly accessible, with lots of references to people and cultural tics one might not expect. She nods to old chestnuts like Freud, who argued that the evolving process of “civilization” makes people unhappy because it restricts individual desire, but in talking about resisting the “happiness imperative” brought down on society, she brings in black scholar Cornell West, who argues that joy cuts across individual pleasure. “Joy tries to get at those non-market values—love, care, kindness, service, solidarity, the struggle for justice—values that provide the possibility of bringing people together,” West notes. Segal also mourns for a collective joy that has been damaged or killed not just by inequality, but also by modern irony. “If happiness can prove elusive or fleeting over a lifetime,” she writes, “joy itself is often not mentioned at all today, except glibly.”
A calm, refreshing breath of fresh air in a dangerously uncertain moment in human history.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78663-154-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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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