A brisk, witty look at writing about the dead.
Who is remembered.
Since 2015, when he was assigned to the obituary desk at The New York Times, Roberts has “buried,” as he puts it, some 1,600 individuals. Although he admits to having an aversion to death, he’s found obit writing satisfying: “[I]t necessitates heavy research, empowers writers with fewer fetters, and opens a window onto undiscovered, even previously unknown, worlds.” Succinct (between 800 and 1,200 words, though much longer for celebrities) and written to a short deadline, an obit aims to “capture the scope of an entire career and whether the world is better or worse because that person was briefly among its inhabitants.” Besides providing “a memorial that is universal, accessible, and eternal,” obits reflect cultural and social values—with the result that most have been about white men. Among many individuals not memorialized in the Times were “the photographer Diane Arbus; the poet Sylvia Plath; and Alan Turing, the mathematician, computer scientist, and code breaker who had been convicted under Britain’s harsh homophobic statutes.” Also omitted were the blues singer Gladys Bentley, the composer Scott Joplin, and the journalist Ida B. Wells. The newspaper’s “Overlooked” section, with more than 250 installments online and in print, helps to rectify those omissions. Some people are so famous that they merit advance-written obits, of which the Times has a stockpile of more than 2,000. Being interviewed for your own obituary, Roberts comments, is seen as “something of a status symbol.” Besides referencing more than 200 obits from various publications, he considers how obituary writers are portrayed in fiction and movies, dubious claims of famous last words, quirky reasons some people get obituaries, and reveals his own bright idea of finding out whether noted people were dead or alive (hence the book’s title)—a project carried out with zeal by his colleague Frank Bruni.
A brisk, witty look at writing about the dead.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2026
ISBN: 9781639733651
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2026
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
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
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