Lots of self-contained fascinating thoughts about matters such as the impact of TV on viewers, but too often de Zengotita...
How direct experience seems to have been replaced by the representations of life—images delivered by profit-oriented or otherwise suspiciously motivated media interveners.
Self-styled social-critic de Zengotita (Anthropology/New York Univ.) offers a mostly pessimistic, mostly ironic extended commentary about the contemporary American experience. It seems that media—broadly but never specifically defined here—have taken over hundreds of millions of minds. Almost every concept, almost every tangible object, is commodified, he says. The result? It’s nearly impossible to think of even highly personal events such as birth or marriage without being influenced by images concocted by others, including movie producers, self-help authors, counselors, workshop presenters, memoirists, philosophers, and the like. Maybe a few objects are just what they are, he says, using paper clips and pencils as examples, purchased and used not because of what they say about a life, but because of their unadorned functionality. Such objects are rare in his view of the world, however, as are unmediated thoughts. He uses the death of Princess Diana as an example of mediated reality, meaning that those who paid attention “were truly grieving and they were performing. Immersed in a world continuously represented from every angle, they understood Di’s death as an opportunity to play a significant role in it, to represent themselves at levels of prominence usually reserved for the celebrated. But they already knew how to be representational.” Because it seems that anything and everything, anybody and everybody, could be considered a mediator or be mediated, de Zengotita’s hypothesis is so all-encompassing as to be elusive. In a preface, the author tells us that “the actual process of mediationis elaborate beyond imagining,” a warning that proves all too true. This extended essay perhaps would have been more effective as a magazine article than as an exhaustingly abstract, repetitive book.
Lots of self-contained fascinating thoughts about matters such as the impact of TV on viewers, but too often de Zengotita offers seemingly random ideas in search of a lucid thesis.Pub Date: March 2, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-357-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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