To see the world in a grain of sand might be within the powers of a Blake, but realists may doubt whether a high-tech consultant and his collaborator can accurately assess a generational subgroup and its impact on American society on the basis of 300 or so interviews over a seven-year period, plus ancillary statistical data. Undaunted, Leinberger and Tucker (co-author, James Brown: The Godfather of Soul, 1986) attempt to define the approximately 19 million adult children sired by ``organization men'' (the felicitous term coined in 1956 by William H. Whyte). They do so, moreover, in deadly earnest fashion and with a surfeit of bafflegab. Focusing on the members of two putatively representative families (who were among Whyte's original subjects), the authors trace the typically convulsive evolution of organizational offspring from so-called authentic selves to artificial persons. In this murky context, they purport to probe such issues as: how the life experiences of this minority segment of the 75-million-strong baby-boom generation compare with those of its parents; occupational rivalry; socioeconomic trends in a postmetropolitan era; and the widespread urge to be creative. The Leinberger-Tucker team concludes that sons and daughters of the organization are all ``stout individualists—each in exactly the same way,'' i.e., with values, philosophical outlooks, and underlying motives that are essentially identical. From a behavioral standpoint, the authors argue, these less-than-rugged individualists express themselves either as humanists or egoists. By their account, the former tend to demand that organizations become more caring and sensitive, while the latter reason they can function without animating essences or principles. According to Leinberger and Tucker, the implications of the ``ambiguously enterprising'' organization offsprings' assuming positions of trust, responsibility, and power in the workplace as their elders pass the torch are far from clear. Despite a paucity of credible evidence to support any such claim, the authors theorize that the advent of these frustrated narcissists could signal a restoration of US competitiveness as well as compassion. Haute twaddle.
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-016591-X
Page Count: 464
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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
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