An inspiring yet disheartening account of an eclectic team of ``urban peace corps'' workers who spent nine months in service to the city of Boston. City Year is a Boston-based nonprofit group that recruits young people to put in a year of community service before they move on to shape their adult lives. At first privately funded, the organization has since received a multimillion-dollar federal grant to serve as a pilot program for the ``season of service'' called for by President Clinton. City Year's workers represent Boston's diverse population: black, Hispanic, white, Oriental; college students and high-school dropouts; stable middle-class kids and those who have ping-ponged among foster families. Goldsmith (director of a Washington, D.C., community service project) joined a City Year team in 1990 and, here, reports on her experience honestly and intimately. Her team members were so mismatched that they called themselves ``the Misfits''—among them numbered a beautiful black woman who was a West Point dropout; men who'd had brushes with the law; an Oriental woman disoriented by cultural shock; and a former peace-worker. The group returned to Boston to begin its service: restoring a community garden and playground; rebuilding a greenhouse at a mental hospital; assisting in elementary-school classrooms; renovating homeless housing; and organizing a community cleanup. Two months into the work, one member was shot dead outside his home—no motive and no killer were ever found. Others dropped out or couldn't maintain the strict discipline the program demanded, but some of those who finished went on to make their lives in service—although, Goldsmith says, the program in many ways failed people who joined as a last resort or with few resources behind them. An optimistic but realistic assessment of a program that serves as model for a national-service ideal but that may not survive the next round of Congressional budget cuts. (Photos)
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1993
ISBN: 1-56584-093-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1993
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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