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
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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