An optimistic view of the ways in which the human desire to be respected by one’s peers can bring about revolutions, topple...
A solid, sweeping examination of peer pressure as a force for social change.
New York Times Magazine contributor Rosenberg, whose The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism (1996) won both a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, looks at how a variety of difficult problems around the world have been solved through peer pressure, a phenomenon that she calls “the social cure.” People care what their peers think of them, writes the author, and this fact can be employed to bring about desirable changes in a society. Rosenberg relates how a number of different architects of the social cure developed their strategies and challenged an undesirable status quo. She focuses heavily on Otpor, a group-led student movement in Serbia that fought against widespread passivity by making activism attractive to young people and eventually succeeded in removing Slobodan Milosevic from power. Since then, Otpor’s leaders have taught their methods in other countries and helped bring about revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia. The author also examines loveLife, an AIDS-prevention campaign in South Africa that reached teenagers by being hip and fun; a smoking-prevention program that recognized American teens’ rebellious urges and directed them toward cigarette advertisements; a club-based program that helped black college students work together and improve their scores in calculus courses; and peer-based programs in San Francisco and New York that focus on helping convicts reenter society or deterring at-risk youth from joining gangs. Given these successes, can the social cure be effective in reducing acts of terrorism? Rosenberg looks at some controversial programs in England that are operating inside mosques to reach alienated young Muslim men and de-radicalize them before they become violent. Finally, the author, who has lived in Mexico, outlines a program that demonstrates how peer pressure might be used both inside and outside government to reduce corruption in that country. An appendix provides further information about organizations profiled in the book.
An optimistic view of the ways in which the human desire to be respected by one’s peers can bring about revolutions, topple dictatorships and perhaps produce a safer world.Pub Date: March 28, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-06858-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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