paper 0-226-66772-3 An anthropologist from UCLA constructs a semiotics for decoding the graffiti markings of street gangs. Phillips expresses an interest in the general availability of graffiti as a sign system both historically and cross-culturally, but her main focus is on how gangs in L.A. deploy this form of writing to symbolically demarcate their geographical and political boundaries. Her impetus for the book was an incident in which one young Hispanic “tagger” was killed and another wounded by a white vigilante who was carrying an illegal handgun. Public response to the story seemed to indicate a high level of support for the shooter, thus indicating that the general fear of graffiti and its effects on neighborhoods warrants severe measures be taken against its practitioners. What the public fears to be a cryptic threat to its safety and quality of life, Phillips recognizes as a creative response to a situation of nearly intolerable disenfranchisement. More than this, Phillips employs her study of graffiti as a methodology for writing and thinking about gang life and issues without fixating on violent behaviors and stereotypes—as often occurs in academic work on street gangs. By photographing wall markings and then bringing the pictures with her as she seeks out individual artists for interviews, she builds a bond with informants who might otherwise have been very hesitant to speak about their work with an anthropological field-worker. She studies and compares the graffiti styles of African-American gangs, such as the Bloods and the Crips, and Chicano gangs, such as the Santa Monica Little Locos, and explores how the medium allows gangs to close themselves into bounded systems, cordon off territories, make their places within neighborhoods, define friends and enemies, and negotiate a host of political and cultural concerns. Perhaps the least hysterical exploration into the life of urban street gangs in the US to date. (13 color, 104 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-226-66771-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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
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