An intelligent mix of research and pop culture, Caulfield’s analysis of celebrity trends gets to the heart of America’s...
Caulfield (Health Law and Policy/Univ. of Alberta; The Cure for Everything: Untangling Twisted Messages about Health, Fitness, and Happiness, 2012) dispels the myths of celebrity-endorsed products and the cult of fame that they sell.
More than ever, we view celebrities as paragons of success and emulate celebrity lifestyles in increasingly extreme ways—e.g., Kim Kardashian–like butt implants. With such power and influence, it’s no surprise that celebrities take advantage of their status to endorse products that benefit their brands. The so-called authority of celebrities hawking wares is especially questionable when these products sell a “healthy” lifestyle or guarantee a more youthful complexion, for example. Caulfield sees these products as dangerous and shallow money-grabs rather than legitimate health plans. However, despite his willingness to burst the celebrity bubble, the author admits that he is not out to attack celebrities or celebrity. In fact, he admits his love of celebrity; as part of his excursion, he auditioned for American Idol to get into the minds of the fame-obsessed. Beginning with Gwyneth Paltrow’s famous Clean Cleanse, Caulfield systematically dismantles the notion that celebrity products have any scientific foundation to justify their claims, and he even counters that many of them actually have the opposite effect. Caulfield goes beyond simply calling out celebrities as modern-day snake oil salesmen. He delves deeper into the social phenomenon of fame itself, asking why celebrities have this power in the first place and why most people are willing to heed their advice even when they are not surprised to learn that celeb products boast phony claims. This disconnect, writes the author, is even more perplexing when he considers how rare fame is and how devastating it can be.
An intelligent mix of research and pop culture, Caulfield’s analysis of celebrity trends gets to the heart of America’s obsession with the fame monster.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5748-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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