A smartly stitched quilt of Americana that could use a bit more color, by a talented essayist (Stolen Words, 1989, etc.) and novelist (Aurora 7, 1990, etc.). Some of these pieces are culled, with minor changes, from The American Spectator, The Yale Review, and Southwest Review. Mallon decided to explore his subjects in ``an attitude of active passivity''; what results is first-rate but frustratingly neutral (for the most part) reporting on 12 ``spectacles''— divided, sometimes awkwardly, into six matched pairs. The author watches the shuttle Discovery blast off, and then writes about ``ad hoc, can-do little Poker Flats,'' a quasi-private rocket-launching site in Alaska. A lengthy account of a bank-robbery trial is twinned with a report on the impending execution of killer Robert Alton Harris, while a piece on a Rhode Island senatorial election goes with an account of a day with Dan Quayle (in a typical pinpoint description, Mallon calls the Veep ``a sweet, miniature creature in a Republican petting zoo''). The 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor rides alongside a funny account of bumbling at the UN; a description of a rodeo is married to one of a local-hero festival in Michigan; a visit to the Sundance Film Festival precedes a report on the disposal of the late Rex Harrison's possessions (Mallon bought the actor's leaky oak-and-silver wine bucket). The best essays are clever and combative, filled with the jabs and jigs of Mallon's book-length nonfiction: The UN piece ridicules that institution as a ``toy'' world spouting ``sweetened Newspeak''; the spaceflight essays plump for a manned Mars mission; Sundance is exposed as a mannered farce. Otherwise, Mallon seems content to stay in the background, and the pieces suffer, becoming well-crafted Sunday magazine fare, without real bite. Not enough fireworks in these spectacles. Anything Mallon turns out is good—but he can do better than this.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-89919-939-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1992
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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