Big business proves the villain in Kline's informed discussion of how TV-marketing experts have manipulated children's views of culture. Kline (Communication/Simon Fraser University) doesn't disagree with Ellen Seiter (Sold Separately—reviewed below) that TV is an instrument of socialization for children. But he questions whether what's shown on TV is a true reflection of society or, rather, a version shaped by marketing executives. Children's TV programming reflects the long evolution of a child's place in society, Kline says, illuminated by the 19th-century concept that children's ``books should serve children's needs''—a concept that culminated in 20th-century comic books. Disney's fairy-tale features gave cartoons respectability and opened the door to The Mickey Mouse Club, a revelation to children's marketing entrepreneurs like Hanna-Barbera (Huckleberry Hound, The Flintstones). As spin-off products showed the strength of the market, ingenious promoters, capitalizing on the inattention of the Reagan-era FCC, reversed the process, introducing the product—e.g., Strawberry Shortcake—and then the TV series. Toys followed a similar route, from handcrafted wood to mass-produced plastic objects that became links to the world of imagination as marketers listened to what children wanted and pitched their advertising to symbol and fantasy. Just as children once used fairy tales, Kline says, today's kids use TV to ``negotiate'' with the real world—but the purpose of TV, he emphasizes, isn't to impart cultural values but to sell products, leading to poor production values to keep costs down, formulaic scripts that replay gender stereotypes, and the limiting of children's fantasies to the replaying of past episodes. A well-documented case (though padded with TV plots and dialogue, as well as with surveys) that the TV marketplace transmits not children's culture but that of toy companies.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-86091-397-X
Page Count: 395
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1993
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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