Greatly accessible compendium of scholarly passion.
A British journalist and historian examines Scotland’s movements for home rule and independence—not necessarily conjoined—and illuminates their tangled roots.
Ascherson (Black Sea, 1995, etc.) sees the politics of Scotland, old and ongoing, beset with what he calls “St. Andrew’s fault”: the divide between a tentative, nonassertive majority perennially jostled, admonished, and sometimes inspired by an assertive minority that is usually exhorting “patriotism” to people unsure whether they live in a nation, an underprivileged colony, or some kind of artifact. What all should grasp, Ascherson believes, is that the urging for collective freedom, a.k.a. nationhood, is a rare Scottish continuum in an otherwise turbulent, chaotic, and often violent history. For those who apprehend it, the message can seem as old as the myriad standing stones left behind by a Neolithic culture, but it’s not that easy to learn a history rent over centuries by the worst kind of religious repression and political revisionism, whether in collusion with England or by Scots factions acting on their own. Even today, the author argues, Scottish history gets short and “less coherent” shrift even in Scotland’s own schools. Ascherson does his best to provide remedial thinking, explaining why England’s return of the Stone of Scone (as a “loaner”) was greeted by a mass shrug, why having their own Parliament (since 1999, facing initial reelections this year) makes some Scots uneasy, and why Scots surprised even themselves by celebrating Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, which portrayed 13th-century patriot William Wallace. The tone is mostly affectionate and informed, except when, say, Margaret Thatcher is painted as a 20th-century Longshanks who hammers the Scots with economic policies that gut linchpin industries like mining and steel. For this and other reasons, it’s Ascherson’s hunch that Scotland will someday depart the UK for its own rendezvous with Europe.
Greatly accessible compendium of scholarly passion.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8090-8491-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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