The usual tongue-clucking about the egghead conspiracy, on about the same intellectual level as the “annoy a liberal” bumper...
Social Security? Racism? Inflation? There’s nothing wrong with the American system that a trip to Wal-Mart won’t cure.
So goes this right-wing nostrum by journalist Malanga, who seems not to have heard that the Republicans are in charge. No, for Malanga, a shadowy world of academics, laborites, students, environmentalists and minorities opposes all that is good and just in American life, and it is thanks to them that we have such communist-front agitations as the broad demand for a living wage, a campaign that owes all “to the backing of leftist foundations”—the pinko counterparts, that is, to the neoconservative Manhattan Institute, which bankrolls Malanga. And what’s wrong with a living wage? Well, Malanga asserts, “the free market provides far greater economic opportunity and a decent standard of living for far more people than government-controlled markets.” Witness Wal-Mart, which un-Americans love to hate: Wal-Mart takes care of its minions, who are of course free to sell their services elsewhere and who, in any case, will rise far within the system if only they believe and serve it faithfully (“While employment at unionized food stores tends to be static . . . Wal-Mart promotes heavily from within”). As for naysayers such as Barbara Ehrenreich, well, she’s “a longtime rebel with an anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide, who can’t stomach the basic boundaries that most people easily accept in the workplace.” And as for strayers from the true path like Richard Florida, who has argued that livable cities with diverse populations are incubators of talent and growth—well, Malanga notes, thanks to him Austin recently put up a statue to the late rock guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, not Jim Bowie. Do we need another foretoken of the decline and fall of America?
The usual tongue-clucking about the egghead conspiracy, on about the same intellectual level as the “annoy a liberal” bumper stickers that have been popping up lately. Caveat emptor.Pub Date: May 20, 2005
ISBN: 1-56663-644-2
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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