Even if Crawford is fighting a losing battle, he fights it valiantly, even heroically.
A philosopher stakes his claim to freedom and the open road.
What do driving cars and riding motorcycles have to do with philosophy? Quite a bit, it seems, at least when Crawford is steering the discussion. As in his previous books, Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head, the author brings an easy and wide-ranging erudition to his subject—in this case, our relationships to our vehicles. The book might have been titled In Defense of Driving. Despite his mostly sober prose, Crawford’s “critical, humanistic inquiry” is ultimately a passionate appeal to the importance of the autonomous individual in the face of the dehumanizing pressure of automation. Driverless cars meet a worthy opponent in Crawford, who elegantly dissuades us from a future in which “the world becomes a techno-zoo for defeated people, like the glassy-eyed creatures in WALL-E, or like the lab rats who are raised in Plexiglas enclosures.” No matter how many lives you think could be saved by removing imperfect humans from the driving equation or how tempting you find it to turn your commute into more time looking at your phone, this book will have you pining for the freedom the open road has always represented. Crawford can get carried away, as in a too-detailed account (with diagrams) of rebuilding a Volkswagen engine, but his delight in his subject makes for an enjoyable reading experience even for the non-enthusiast. The text is yet more evidence for Crawford’s argument, now extending over three books, that paying attention to and placing ourselves in the material world brings a certain satisfaction that we neglect at our peril. Employing memoir, journalism, cultural criticism, and political philosophy—and never shying away from the contentious (“An Ode to Redneck Women”)—the author makes being human seem worthwhile.
Even if Crawford is fighting a losing battle, he fights it valiantly, even heroically.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-274196-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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