May not alter opinions among true believers on either side of the gun control debate but will hopefully influence the...
A longtime critic of American gun culture aims again at targets he holds responsible for the carnage.
Diaz (Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America, 1999, etc.) pushed for responsible gun control legislation and regulation while employed at the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C. This new book, obviously timely in the wake of recent mass murders around the country, updates and expands his advocacy. In the first three chapters, the author documents the extraordinary level of gun violence in the United States compared to other nations and explains the impact of such violence on individuals and families, cities and rural areas, states and the entire democratic experience. Then, Diaz focuses on gun manufacturers and policy lobbyists, especially the National Rifle Association, that, in Diaz's view, are more concerned with their profit-and-loss statements than with the emotional losses suffered when guns kill or maim. The author attempts to prove that the NRA and its allies are not too powerful to resist successfully in the institutions that have previously enabled them, from state legislatures and Congress to the White House and the courts. Although Diaz is an advocate, he is not shrill; he gathers evidence through careful reporting and marshals his arguments well. Many of the case studies are horrifying and instructive but little known, in part because local media coverage is rarely picked up outside its tight geographic radius. Diaz is on firm ground when he claims that gun violence is actually underreported in the United States, which makes the incidents in the headlines all the more frightening. His suggested reforms, while not original, are well-presented at a time when similar proposals are being debated in state legislatures and Congress.
May not alter opinions among true believers on either side of the gun control debate but will hopefully influence the thinking of people with open minds.Pub Date: March 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59558-830-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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
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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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