A glamorized hypothesis that bubbles over with pithy, socially conscious observations, but the classic associations formed...
A droll comparison of the cult of celebrity to the Classics.
In entertaining the notion that celebrities are indeed godlike, former Daily Telegraph deputy literary editor Payne spends most of his debut establishing similarities between the primitive and the urbane. The author draws these parallels adroitly, marrying the hollow-smiled, high-gloss shenanigans of the rich and famous with ancient civilizations, religion and Greek mythology. In Payne’s world, Britney Spears’s much-publicized shaving of her “mucky, black locks”—and the subsequent sale of that hair on eBay—is akin to the mythological self-sacrifice of Iphigenia. Also, Michael Jackson’s varied eccentricities are comparable to Athenian statesman Cimon, who concealed his own death. Payne devotes chapters to interesting if not entirely persuasive pop-culture commentary. He predictably asserts that the beauty-potential of famous women is much more closely scrutinized than that of their male counterparts (“they are allowed to look good as they grow old”); speculates that INXS front man Michael Hutchence, who enjoyed romances with recognizable beauties Helena Christensen and Kylie Minogue, took his own life in 1997 due to sheer boredom rather than severe depression; and looks at how the Big Brother reality-TV program and its democratic voting/eviction process is emblematic of Athenian ostracism. Payne’s philosophizing on the perfumes of Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez dilutes the zaniness even further. The author’s wry, consistently whimsical analysis should be enjoyed with a grain of salt and a delicious appreciation for the classicist’s thought process, and his defining moment arrives when delivering the theory that celebrity obsession can be both a callous weapon of dehumanization and “something that bonds us.”
A glamorized hypothesis that bubbles over with pithy, socially conscious observations, but the classic associations formed from them can be a stretch.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-42993-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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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