An incisive and instructive study of personality politics and the abuse of power—topical literary criticism with classical...
A leading scholar invokes the Bard of Avon to investigate why anyone would “be drawn to a leader manifestly unsuited to govern, someone dangerously impulsive or viciously conniving or indifferent to the truth.”
In this study of the power-hungry monarchs in the plays of Shakespeare, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Greenblatt (Humanities/Harvard Univ.; The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, 2017, etc.) frequently points out why the great English playwright set his work in the vanished past: It was the only way to write a political play. No one could say a word against Queen Elizabeth and expect to live, but you could do it covertly by wrestling with modern issues from a distant perspective. Though under no such restrictions himself, Greenblatt, who has previously assessed Shakespeare as an editor and a biographer, takes this model to heart, using the plays to deliver his own barbed critique of the current occupant of the White House, who makes the job easy; the author doesn’t even have to say his name. We glimpse him in the demagogue John Cade in 2 Henry VI, eager “to make England great again” by attacking the “educated elite.” In Richard III, we see the swaggerer with a deep inferiority complex, compensating for his defects by “bullying those who possess the natural endowments he lacks.” King Lear’s “boundless desire to hear his praises sung” easily brings to mind a president surrounded by a Cabinet of flatterers. In The Winter Tale’s King Leontes, we see the ruler destroyed by his own suspicions, constantly responding to the fake news in his head. “A tyrant does not need to traffic in facts or apply evidence,” writes the author. “He expects his accusation to be enough.” Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus come in for similar timely reappraisals.
An incisive and instructive study of personality politics and the abuse of power—topical literary criticism with classical virtues.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-393-63575-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
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