A broad examination that sometimes lacks focus but introduces intriguing debates.
Neill offers the first entry in a nonfiction series reflecting on racism and fallacies of American politics.
In an introduction, the author explains that his work is intended as a primer on racism, exploring its psychology, history, and “how our understanding around it has evolved.” Subsequent volumes, he says, will address the hypocrisy he claims that he’s witnessed in his “family of choice” of left-wing progressives: “Intolerance, perfectionism, purity tests, and language policing leave me feeling alienated from brothers and sisters I have embraced as allies,” he states. He organizes this book around lessons that he says he had to learn, such as reconsidering what a racist is, learning new sociological terms, and exploring tools for “course correction.” Neill examines these issues in multiple ways, using anecdotes from his own life, summaries of sociological theories, and accounts from his long history in the recovery community. “It’s hard to see the arsonists of racism is because their hideout is in our heads,” he asserts, before offering a list of logical fallacies that accompany biased thinking. In this book, he strives for an easygoing, approachable tone, even when dealing with difficult subject matter; he’s quick with Titanic jokes while employing the image of an iceberg to explain white supremacy, for example. There’s no shortage of thought-provoking material here as he carefully examines accepted notions, and his own thoughts, from multiple angles. However, as he alternates between accessible summaries of sociological theory, exploration of the parallels between addiction recovery and recognition of internal biases, and critiques of the left, readers may be unclear about what his argument is, or who it’s for. At times, it feels as if the book is trying to earn the trust of some conservatives (“I do believe Donald Trump spreads misogyny and hate….But the anger he tapped into among the American electorate was real and, I’d suggest, some of it justified”), while elsewhere, it’s clearly intended for readers on the left. Nonetheless, the book lays a foundation for fascinating discussion.
A broad examination that sometimes lacks focus but introduces intriguing debates.Pub Date: March 14, 2025
ISBN: 9798313808024
Page Count: 148
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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