by Paul Maliszewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2009
Some entertaining thoughts on the inventive presentation of stuff that might have been so…but wasn’t.
No stranger to creative nonfiction, the author comments on some premeditated misrepresentations and the perps who presented them to a gullible public.
Maliszewski begins his first book with a confession. In 1997, when he was a hack writer at a business journal in upstate New York, he contributed—under assumed names unknown to his employers—letters to the editor spouting raving inanities in deliberately execrable prose. His paper happily accepted and printed his spoofs, completely missing their satiric intent. Maliszewski depicts them as ironic commentary on society’s shoddy standards in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, Hans van Meegeren and Clifford Irving. His survey of other people’s artistic flimflams touches on diverse cons, frequently using secondary sources for documentation. (He interviewed some present-day practitioners by e-mail, perhaps not the best way to extract candid, unrehearsed responses.) His main interest is in invented nonfiction. The New York Sun in 1835 reported life on the moon, detected via “an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.” (See Matthew Goodman’s delightful The Sun and the Moon, 2008, for details.) People believed it, at least for a while. Fakes, posits Maliszewski, have a short shelf life. But how can we be sure that all frauds are detected? The author writes most engagingly on the application of phony journalism, displaying considerable understanding of deceitful writers like Jayson Blair, James Frey and JT LeRoy. He parses the literary dust-up regarding Michael Chabon’s fanciful autobiographical lectures. “An erstwhile practitioner of the not-always-completely-true” is perhaps not the most trustworthy guide to most subjects, but in this case, Maliszewski’s thoughtful, persuasive text rings, er, true.
Some entertaining thoughts on the inventive presentation of stuff that might have been so…but wasn’t.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59558-422-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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by Abhijit V. Banerjee & Esther Duflo ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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