A set of challenging, intermittently illuminating essays on the nature of work and relationships.
A manifesto in defense of polyamory.
Readers who hate their jobs and have reservations about capitalism will sympathize with the perspective in this collection of essays. Melbourne-based writer Olds began these pieces on an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. Her main interest was in “post-work polyamory,” an idea that’s “premised on and committed to anti-capitalism” and seeks to “abolish the need to work within exploited waged (and unwaged) relations in order to survive.” In the introduction to this U.S. edition, the author writes “about how people get money (an incomplete list from the book: cryptocurrency, sex work, welfare, property, arts grants, café jobs, truck driving).” After a brief history of polyamorous groups and her attempts at polyamorous relationships, Olds presents a manifesto for post-work polyamory, which she describes as “building anti-capitalist strategies into the ongoing practice of equitably distributing labor within relationships”; relates the founding in 19th-century London of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes and similar clubs that “insulated workers from the worst excesses of capitalist modernity” (and documents her visit to one such club); expounds on the hybrid essay form, “both a memoir and a review”; and details the allure of cryptocurrency. Sometimes, the author tries too hard to sound academic—as in writing that polyamory is “the dissemination of reproductive labor into a technocapitalist infrastructure”; “polyamory often tries to banalify itself.” Fortunately, much of the writing isn’t that stuffy, and Olds has a talent for well-phrased witticisms, as when she says that Michel de Montaigne, thought to have originated the hybrid form, “retired from public life to a tower in his family’s castle in Bordeaux (like all good freelancers, Montaigne worked from home)”; or when she writes of a crypto dabbler who writes poetry while working at a brothel: “Guess which one earns them a living?”
A set of challenging, intermittently illuminating essays on the nature of work and relationships.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780316565714
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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