Dour.
Is the state of public intellectualism in decline, or is Posner just really smart and terribly grumpy?
The answer: a bit of the former, a lot of the latter. Anyone who watches cable news knows the punditocracy has lowered the requirements of admission, as volume has replaced reason in public debates. The proliferation of cable channels and other media outlets has created a booming need for talking heads, but these heads often fail to talk as intelligently as they should. Posner (An Affair of State, 1999, etc.) strings together a slew of charts and graphs to document empirically the decline, meticulously counting and then comparing the number of scholarly citations of a public intellectual’s works versus the number of media citations. (In a dazzling display of his math skills, Posner also asserts that U¹(t,b)–U2(t,d)=Z¹>0, but there he’s just showing off.) Of course, Posner is right in many of his assertions, especially his argument that much of the decline is due to academics who write outside of their discipline, but he’s also a bit of a crank, one not above taking a few underhanded swings at his personal foes. Sure, it might be clearly demonstrated that Camille Paglia deserves ridicule, but Martha Nussbaum? If Nussbaum represents the decline of the American intellectual, then we’re in pretty good shape. Likewise, Posner rightly savages the self-serving antics of Paul Ehrlich and Edward Said, but he tosses Lani Guinier into the mix as well, with not much of a hint as to what she did to deserve his opprobrium. To his credit, Posner does achieve a left/right balance in his attacks, positioning himself somewhat above the ideological fray, and his analyses of such figures as Stephen Jay Gould and Noam Chomsky are detailed and articulate. The jeremiad closes with a few impractical suggestions for improvement that will never be adopted. It takes the wind out of a reviewer’s sails when the author predicts one’s criticisms; predicting them, however, does not entail that he doesn’t deserve them.
Dour.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-674-00633-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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