Full of good, smart moments, even if its governing idea is tough to pin down.
A timely cri de guerre—or perhaps antiguerre or autre guerre—from a distinguished student of liberalism and its enemies.
World Policy Institute fellow Berman (A Tale of Two Utopias, 1996, etc.) locks horns with Samuel Huntington’s once ignored but now widely cited “clash of civilizations” thesis, which pits the Islamic against the Western world. The terms are a little off, he argues, especially given that “in all of recent history, no country on earth has fought so hard and consistently as the United States on behalf of Muslim populations—a strange thing to say, given what passes for conventional wisdom.” Why, then, after our efforts in defense of Islamic Kurds, Islamic Marsh Arabs, Islamic Bosnians, and Islamic Kosovars, do Islamicists and terrorists hate Americans so roundly? Perhaps, Berman writes, the battle is not so much between Islam and the West as it is between different strains of Western thought that have been transported around the world: “the totalitarian cult of death” and the classically liberal view of freedom and of free people. That’s not such a strange thesis, given that “an amazing number of the Arab and Muslim terrorists turn out to have second and even primary identities as Westerners,” among them the suicide warriors of 9/11, who schooled in Germany, Belgium, England, and the US and had little evident desire to use their energies at home. (The author notes in passing that members of Osama bin Laden’s immediate family do business today with George Bush the Elder.) Ranging from Camus to Lukacs to Marx to Arafat, Berman explores these conflicting ideologies and their implications, finding time to insert a few kind words about the current president’s successes in Afghanistan and to urge his fellow liberals on in the war against fascism, whatever its other names. “Some aspects of a war against totalitarianism and terror can be fought even by people who cannot abide George W. Bush,” he argues.
Full of good, smart moments, even if its governing idea is tough to pin down.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05775-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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