An empowering but sometimes overly idealistic approach to civil conversations.
A guide to elevating political discourse in America.
Finley and Henderson, co-founders of the Great Lakes Civility Project, aim to open minds and inspire respectful political discussions in this actionable guide. This pair of “professional rivals and polar opposites” met in 2011 while covering a political conference for different Detroit newspapers. Their unlikely but enduring friendship prompted them to spread the gospel of civility, which they define as “having conversations about things you disagree on without letting hate enter into the equation.” They argue that incivility is threatening our democracy and has resulted in Democrats and Republicans being cast as “two armies competing for total dominance.” To shift the country’s course, Finley and Henderson propose four pillars of civility: “dropping assumptions,” “setting honest goals,” “active listening,” and “coming back.” They believe that most people’s opinions are formed similarly: by taking the available information and running it through a filter of values and personal experiences. Rather than viewing conversations as an opportunity to compete with or convert others, the authors advise aiming for authentic connection instead. Finley and Henderson encourage readers to start wherever they have agency and take it “one conversation, one relationship, one community at a time.” The guide offers readers an optimistic blueprint for restoring respectful political dialogue, and the book’s greatest strength is the authors’ embodiment of this approach; they truly walk the walk of the civility they preach. They include persuasive statistics throughout the book to support their arguments, and continually prompt readers to self-reflect with questions like, “What is the benefit of holding assumptions about other people and their beliefs?” However, their approach’s premise relies on all parties adhering to ground rules, such as “Everyone involved in the conversation must agree that it is a safe zone.” The book also seems to naively imply that good-faith conversations are sufficient to repair deep, structural flaws in the political system.
An empowering but sometimes overly idealistic approach to civil conversations.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9780814352182
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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