Tailor-made for the critlib movement, this demonstration that the Library of Congress is not a neutral space begs one...
By examining the treatment of perversion and queer topics by the Library of Congress, Adler (Library and Information Science/Univ. of Kentucky) strives to make a case for the inadequacy of its systems to organize topics outside the norm.
The author begins with an examination of Library of Congress subject headings and its attempts to describe materials about perverse sexual behavior. It’s important to note—and Adler does not do it particularly well until the end of her argument—that her use of the terms “perversity” and “perversion” is neutral rather than negative, even as she takes LoC to task for using them to pathologize nonnormative sexuality. Nevertheless, her argument that the opaque catchall term “paraphilias,” used to describe both books about consensual kink and those about criminal sexual behavior including bestiality and pedophilia, is wholly inadequate is a powerful one. Her history of LoC’s so-called Delta Collection, its closed repository of erotica and pornography, is fascinating, though it’s also tendentiously burdened by metaphor: Adler draws on Foucault, Nabokov, and Borges, as well as the myth of the Minotaur, to envision the relationship of the Delta Collection to the larger library. Adler’s chapter on “Mapping Perversion” is the most poignant, as she examines the inherent inadequacy of “a vast heteropatriarchal classification” to encompass intersectionality. In remarking on the adoption of the tools of LoC by libraries across the country and even around the world, she describes its catalog “as a colonized space” that has become “an instrument of cultural domination.” Adler’s envisioned audience is unclear. Her prose is dense, technical, and larded with exclusionary critical language. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine a general audience for a book about library cataloging. Nevertheless, Adler attempts to bridge the gap between the practitioner and the nonlibrarian scholar with occasional detours to explain such arcana as how LCSH works and the origins of LoC itself.
Tailor-made for the critlib movement, this demonstration that the Library of Congress is not a neutral space begs one critical question: where should it be shelved?Pub Date: April 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8232-7636-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Fordham Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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
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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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