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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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