Readers who come to share Mann’s understanding could find the book useful, or at least a brief diversion from their boring...
Studying a mood that “pops up in every facet of existence, from work to love to war.”
Mann likely won’t mind if you find her debut book a little boring; in fact, she’ll likely expect it. Her engaging, essayistic examination underscores boredom’s pervasiveness, how most people find themselves bored by most things—work most of all. Recognizing her own tendencies toward boredom and the restlessness that often accompanies it, she decided to start exploring just what boredom is, why it is so common, and what, if any, purpose it serves. She finds she is not alone: “Boredom in 2015 was becoming something of a hot topic, an old feeling made new by media attention, and here we were at the very cusp of a trend,” she writes of attending a sold-out event called “Bored and Brilliant.” (Mann also learned about international conferences on the topic, but why spend the money to travel to Poland when there’s so much boredom to study near home in Manhattan?) The author attended a sex-toy party for some insight on how to deal with boredom in bed or with monogamy in general. She explores how some consider travel an antidote for boredom, with a whole industry of tourism catering to that need. She writes of the “restless violence” to which teenage boys in particular are prone as they try to break the cycle (also termed “boredom-induced violence”) and the deep depression into which some can descend, with boredom as a trigger or at least an early warning sign. She writes of boredom as a part of the creative process. Mostly, she distracts herself with the project, but even she can become bored with the study of boredom, recognizing the penchant that sparked her interest in the first place. She concludes that “the things I learned about boredom, and the ways I learned to talk about it, actually proved useful.”
Readers who come to share Mann’s understanding could find the book useful, or at least a brief diversion from their boring lives.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-53584-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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