The repetition may be maddening, drilled into readers like a kata, but Larkin provides some useful nuggets for these fraught...
“That one time when violence is the answer, make no mistake, it will be the only answer”—a timely survival manual for life in a strange era.
Violence is always the last resort. That said, given a time of slashers on city buses, shooters in the streets, and a politics of division and hatred, to say nothing of the usual mashers and bullies, it’s useful to know how to take down a threat. The necessary precondition, writes security expert and former military intelligence officer Larkin (Survive the Unthinkable: A Total Guide to Women’s Self-Protection, 2013), is what might be called situational awareness. “Listening to music full blast and staring into the abyss of our never-ending Facebook news feed effectively makes us deaf and blind,” he writes, and eminently vulnerable to the predators among us. While noting continually that violence moves any argument onto ground that you can no longer control, the author allows that there are times when the only response is just that; in any violent encounter, he urges, “the real edge goes to the person with the willingness and the training to get the job done.” His book amounts to a kind of notional manual geared more toward reconciliation with the fact that it’s an ugly world in which “asocial violence” is rampant rather than a practical guide to pressure points and guaranteed knockout punches—though there certainly are mentions of such things. As the narrative draws to a close, we find Larkin celebrating, more than once, the satisfaction that comes from rhythmic smacking and hearing the crunch of an enemy’s bone, all thanks to the fact that readers, now convinced that the world is indeed an arena of Darwinian struggle, have become “explosively efficient.” Atavistically so, one might say, but given that the headlines would seem to bear Larkin out, it might be just the attitude to adopt.
The repetition may be maddening, drilled into readers like a kata, but Larkin provides some useful nuggets for these fraught times. And remember: violence is always the last resort—even if you’re a ninja.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-35464-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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