The argument is a little scattershot and occasionally self-serving, as social criticism tends to be, but Jacoby makes a good...
Anti-intellectualism is as American as—well, as anti-intellectualism, an ironic tradition that, writes Jacoby (Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, 2004, etc.), allows the president to declare himself pro-education while admitting to not reading newspapers.
Of course, the author adds, Bush said that “he rarely read newspapers because that would expose him to ‘opinions,’ ” opinions presumably meaning anything with which he did not agree. Yet Bush’s just-plain-folks appeals worked, at least for a while; even Hillary Clinton calls people folks, which, grumbles Jacoby, sounds forced and inauthentic, just like the rest of politics. Americans, it seems, prefer their presidents on the autodidactic side, and not too smart. Even if Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar, Teddy Roosevelt a historian and Woodrow Wilson a college president, the model is always of Lincoln, even if he in turn lamented “his lack of systematic formal schooling [which is] left out of the self-congratulatory story of American self-education.” Contrary to this strain, notes the author, is the middlebrow contribution to the culture, which thrived on self-education and manifested itself in such organs as the Book-of-the-Month Club, all “within the broader context of mass marketing.” Even the middlebrows are largely absent these days, Jacoby laments, as are the opportunities she once had as a magazine writer to turn out long think pieces for women’s magazines that now specialize in short features about how to please your man. Jacoby twits the academic enemies of intelligence—professors who write endless tomes on Bob Dylan’s poetry and chair programs in “fat studies”—while zapping the usual suspects, such as television and video games, as assassins of the mind and spirit.
The argument is a little scattershot and occasionally self-serving, as social criticism tends to be, but Jacoby makes a good case for having a president who reads and a culture that provides material worth reading.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42374-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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