An imperfect but noble effort.
Art historian and curator Archer-Shaw investigates the degree to which black culture influenced Parisian artists in the 1920s.
The author is not primarily concerned with this subject’s more sensational or glamorized aspects, such as the sojourns in Paris during the 1920s of famous African-Americans like boxer Jack Johnson, entertainer Josephine Baker, or musician Sidney Bechet. Rather, her objective is to scrutinize the motives of some of the artists who exploited the new trend to promote their own ideas of modernity. She examines, for example, the move toward primitivism in the fine arts, making some not-unfamiliar observations about the degree to which African art and African-American culture in general worked its magic on figures as diverse as Brancusi, Man Ray, and Picasso. The vogue for primitivism, of course, reflected in large degree the weakening of the traditional philosophical bases of Western culture (particularly Christianity) in the wake of WWI, but Archer-Shaw is sensitive to the contradictions inherent in this movement. During the course of her explorations, for example, Archer-Shaw looks at the many ways in which Christianity’s metaphorical juxtaposition of black and white as visual representations of good and evil helped indirectly to shape European thinking on questions of race and ethnicity. In addition, she traces the development of stereotypical 19th-century images of blacks in the popular arts as they were passed down to 20th-century Europeans (largely as comic archetypes in the mode of Stepinfetchit). These are not necessarily new or startling observations at this stage in the history of African-American cultural studies, but Archer-Shaw does have her moments (particularly when she sticks with her specialty, which is art). Her forays into sociology are less impressive.
An imperfect but noble effort.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2000
ISBN: 0-500-28135-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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