A large premise yields slight results.
Seeking to illuminate the emotional relationship between people and things, a psychiatrist examines objects from Beanie Babies to a “Roboslapper” through the lens of literature, academic sources and his personal observations.
We start our psychological connection with the material world early, contends Akhtar (Psychiatry/Jefferson Medical Coll.; Immigration and Identity, 1999, etc.). A baby blanket or teddy bear allows toddlers to “create the experiential realm between the inner world and external reality.” This grows into the ability to grasp the world on a metaphorical level and opens the door to understanding art and literature. A section entitled “Everything” touches upon anthropologists’ view that amassing belongings helps human beings mark milestones; it also looks at the driving role played in the urge to collect by childhood experiences, particularly loneliness. “Sacred Things” yields a mixed bag of largely basic information about topics including the Wailing Wall, the elephant-headed deity Ganesha and the Dome of the Rock, along with interesting etymological analyses of “sacred,” “profane” and the Hebrew word “qadosh.” Abruptly switching gears from the sacred, “Sexy Things” explores the very subjective notion of what makes something a turn-on. After offering overbroad distinctions between men’s and women’s perceptions, Akhtar stumbles into a few judgmental and off-kilter conclusions. For example, he soberly informs us that the anal insertion of a cucumber, banana or even a dildo “is a travesty of the purposes for which these objects are made.” Among the highlights are some intriguing thing-related factoids: The inventor of the Frisbee instructed his family that after death his remains should be incorporated into limited edition Frisbees; after the Collyer brothers’ deaths in the 1940s, New York police could barely enter their residence, crammed as it was with nearly 180 tons of junk, including six tons of old newspapers, the chassis of a Model T Ford and an armory of weapons and firearms.
A large premise yields slight results.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-5444-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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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