A nuanced argument of interest to those who worry that nuanced arguments are no longer possible in quad or classroom.
A rousing call for speech on college campuses that is truly free, addressing uncomfortable issues while allowing room for dissent.
The habit of thinking clearly about big-picture issues of politics, philosophy, ethics, identity, and other realms, the very stuff of liberal discourse, is “virtually impossible for a great many people in academic life.” So writes Salmagundi editor Boyers (English/Skidmore Coll.; The Fate of Ideas: Seductions, Betrayals, Appraisals, 2015, etc.) in this bracing—and, at turns, eminently arguable—defense of norms of free inquiry against aggrieved identity politics. He’s pretty woke, a student told him, for “an old white guy like you.” Old white guys have feelings, too—and histories that embrace centuries of struggle and survival that don’t often figure in the modern narrative. Boyers begins by examining the modern notion of privilege, recalling what would probably have been an actionable case today of one of his own professors who advised him to lose his Brooklyn accent lest he not be taken seriously. Privilege, as in white privilege, is a real thing, at least of a kind, he allows: That professor would be hauled up today for classism and put through sensitivity training, but the very idea of white privilege is now a “formula resistant to meaningful conversations, which fuels insupportable assumptions and resentments.” Boyers cites cases: a student who cannot believe that Nadine Gordimer, the South African writer, can speak with any authority of the lives of black South Africans; the novelist Viet Tranh Nguyen, whose article on the supposed hostility of writers’ workshops to people of color rouses Boyers’ vigorous objections. Coming from a clearly liberal point of view, Boyers nonetheless courts controversy—and is bound to get it—with some of his tenets, such as the thought that identity politics as such evinces “a fear of the uncertainties and hard choices that come with modernity and the need to think.”
A nuanced argument of interest to those who worry that nuanced arguments are no longer possible in quad or classroom.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982127-18-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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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