Flintier than Paul Goldberger’s Up from Zero (p. 724), unsparingly showing New York City’s power brokers taking a...
Architectural writer Nobel takes a gimlet-eyed view of the reconstruction process, analyzing how various characters went about filling the multifaceted void left by the erasure of the World Trade Center.
After a short-lived grace period, speculation asserted its hold on the future, the author states in his insightful and sophisticated critique. Real estate came first, symbolism last. Whether or not Minoru Yamasaki’s original World Trade Center was truly a grand monument to humanism, any gestures toward redemption and healing never had a chance in the post-9/11 world: the new structure would be an office space, period, and if any therapeutic meaning was in evidence, it would be at the behest of the lease-holder. Larry Silverstein wanted to get the job done in the best modern tradition of New York City construction: cheap and fast. What was peddled as citywide, if not nationwide, renewal was just so much circus involving glancing conflicts, collisions of interests, makeshift resolutions, chance, and constructed happenings. After much folderol over public input, after the open forums, after Herbert Muschamp’s trumpeting of an antibureaucratic agenda in the New York Times, after all the emotional riptides that forced Governor George Pataki to search outside his vested interests and gained Studio Daniel Libeskind the design award, what lay at the heart of reconstruction was an architectural bureaucracy, spearheaded and typified by Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill (Silverstein’s chosen firm), for whom expressive content goes begging. By the time SOM was brought into the picture, the public was a quaint apostrophe, and its need for shelter for the city’s grief would not be a major factor. SOM would trim Libeskind’s grand sails and signal the ascendancy of engineering over art: let them rotate; there was rent to be made on this turf.
Flintier than Paul Goldberger’s Up from Zero (p. 724), unsparingly showing New York City’s power brokers taking a nation-bending hole in the ground and mixing into it a witch’s brew of ego, politics, greed, and amnesia.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-7494-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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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