Of little ambition, and out-of-tune.
Debut from Spin senior writer Spitz, a story of (surprise) 1980s rock ’n’ roll.
Joe Green is a little nostalgic for the ’80s of his youth: “I’d happily saw off a nut to go back for just an hour so that I could be that person with untouched flesh and easily filtered pores and a virgin liver, wondering what my first fuck or my first line of coke or the first time I hear a song that changes my life is going to be like.” More specifically, he longs for the Smiths, a band he considers family. Since that golden era, Joe hasn’t done much but long for it—you know, doing a lot of drugs and sleeping with young girls who want to experience him. Now, he’s a rock journalist who’s blown it with Miki, but before we find out why she’s his ex, we dip into his lousy ’80s childhood with nutty father and stepfather, zany punk-rock mentor/sexual obsession/girlfriend, a private school that is the antithesis of all things cool, and eventually begin to wonder why we’re nostalgic for a chronically uncool era. Enter the Smiths again, whose T-shirt Joe wore before ever even hearing their music. But once he does, that’s all he does—that and begin writing. Years later, when Joe has etched himself into the music world, and the Smiths have written themselves out of it, a plan emerges to engineer a movement to bring them back together, despite the band spokesman’s proclamation that “There’s nobody intelligent enough within the music industry to even try to get the Smiths back together.” He just might be right, but will the ill-advised effort also cost Joe the love he waited for, or will this all end like something from Air Supply? Spitz wants to be writing voice-over narration for Almost Famous, when he should be writing a book. The prose here is light, and narrative detail that is supposed to characterize the ’80s feels more often like overt product placement.
Of little ambition, and out-of-tune.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-609-81040-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Three Rivers/Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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