Tenderly delivers a frazzled, appealing group of kids, proving once again that no examined life is ordinary.
Affecting, low-key chronicle by Sports Illustrated writer Bamberger (To the Linksland, 1992, etc.) of a year spent with a cross-section of students at Pennsbury High, outside Philadelphia.
Pennsbury is your good-sized Everyschool, drawing its students from the working-class towns of Lower Bucks County and the posher suburbs surrounding it. Its modest claim to fame, and the hook on which the author drapes his story, is an old-fashioned prom night held in the school gymnasium. Almost every senior will attend that event, which threatens to overwhelm a couple of the story’s main characters. Bamberger wisely concentrates on the fates of some dozen students, juniors and seniors, following their trajectories with enough detail to elicit empathy. He profiles a young couple who have a baby, a three-sport icon who buckles slightly under the burden of being considered perfect (though his relationship with his younger brother, who has spina bifida, is perfect), and a kid with cerebral palsy who wonderfully gets his ducks in a row. A grim mid-narrative climax arrives with the terrible death of one whose ducks were already flying very high indeed, even if he was “working on his cool.” But all miniature melodramas lead to the prom, and Bamberger handles them with such aplomb they take on outsized importance, just as the kids experienced them. Will singer John Mayer show? Will the Hollywood motif be a bust? Will the hundreds of strange dreams that the students harbor work out? Teachers, administrators, and parents (like the kids, some are getting it right, while others burn out or just get it wrong) also are melded into a tableau so natural it seems to be breathing on its own.
Tenderly delivers a frazzled, appealing group of kids, proving once again that no examined life is ordinary.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-87113-917-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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
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
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