If you’re a fan of Barthes and of the Umberto Eco of How to Travel with a Salmon, you’ll likely enjoy this modest, minor,...
A deft updating of Parisian semiotics and midcentury cultural criticism for our own time.
Roland Barthes died in 1980, run down by a vehicle in what Walter Benjamin called the capital of the 19th century; having taken some of Benjamin’s ideas and run with them, Barthes was already long renowned for such centrifugal books as Writing Degree Zero and Mythologies. It is the second book that Oxford-based literary scholar Conrad (Verdi and/or Wagner: Two Men, Two Worlds, Two Centuries, 2014, etc.) takes on in this sometimes fresh, sometimes tired look at the hidden structures and unacknowledged tendencies of our own day: why is Apple’s apple an apple, after all? Ah, there we go back to the Garden of Eden, where, Conrad cleverly opines, “the ban imposed by God had nothing to do with the wickedly tasty properties of the fruit: it was an arbitrary demonstration of divine power, like an order not to walk on the grass or feed the pigeons.” As with all cultural criticism, there’s an element of the unworldly in Conrad’s essays: of course the Apple icon on the computer has nothing to do with the biblical story, and who thought it did? There are some tired tropes at work, too, among others laments for the death of the book, which seems to be stubbornly refusing to die even as books are written about its demise. But there are many smart things about Conrad’s argument, too, as when, in a moment reminiscent of John Lennon on the popularity of God, he writes that Steve Jobs—who, it should be said, is far from his only subject here, though a prominent one—“brought about an awakening more permanent and widespread than Billy Graham’s soul-saving campaign.” True enough, even if Conrad seems to take arch delight in tweaking noses as he says so.
If you’re a fan of Barthes and of the Umberto Eco of How to Travel with a Salmon, you’ll likely enjoy this modest, minor, but entertaining rejoinder.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-500-29258-7
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
PERSPECTIVES
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