An instructive engagement with the world of travel writing and a first-class exemplar of its practice.
An appeal for more responsible tourism replete with respectful and inquisitive travelers.
An American journalist and travel writer based in France, McClanahan, a regular contributor to the New York Times, believes that contemporary global tourism should turn away from commercialization, which is often insensitive to the harm caused to local communities and the environment. In her estimation, contemporary international tourism is destructive and self-indulgent. Reform, though, will require a proportional expansion in tourists who value diverse cultures and learn from their tourist experiences. This “new tourist” could counterbalance the many people who visit tourist enclaves solely to consume theatrical versions of local culture. The author chronicles the rise in the 1970s of travel books that appealed to less affluent and more adventurous travelers and the impact in the 2000s of social media on print-based travel writing. She examines the post-1970s commitment to tourism as an integral component of government economic development policies, the emergence of “tourist traps” that cater to fantasy versions of a place, and the inevitable backlash when tourism drives up rent, takes over beaches, damages the local environment, and undermines traditional culture. McClanahan also tells stories of local groups and local governments working to better manage tourism. She illustrates these themes with descriptions of her visits to such places as Angkor Wat, downtown Liverpool, Barcelona, the French Alps, Hawaii, Amsterdam’s red-light district, and Disneyland Paris (formerly Euro Disney). By deftly weaving together her impressions of these places and stories of the people she interviewed, McClanahan creates an engaging and thoughtful assessment of international tourism. She offers few recommendations beyond more community involvement and stronger governmental regulation, however. Rather, her goal is to provide a “framework” for readers to ask pertinent questions about other places.
An instructive engagement with the world of travel writing and a first-class exemplar of its practice.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781668011775
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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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