Not an optimistic picture but perceptive and forcefully argued.
The acclaimed actor and playwright offers a brief, disturbing meditation on the “story of civilization.”
“I’m upset about what my species has turned out to be—the species that went mad and destroyed the planet,” writes Shawn (Essays, 2010, etc.) in this jeremiad about the state of humanity. Anyone who has seen the author’s plays knows that he is drawn to the dark side of existence, and the current political climate has darkened his mood further. After spending a night watching TV news in a hotel room, he wonders if the world will ever stop rewarding “people like Trump, whose frighteningly bloated, distended, almost-bursting egos and paranoid eyes scanning the horizon for enemies seem to thrill so many people.” That’s all the impetus needed for Shawn—who grew up privileged in a fancy New York apartment with rooms “full of ashtrays and bourbon” and with a father, New Yorker editor William Shawn, who believed that civilization was justified because it produced Beethoven—to expound upon the ills of modern society. He packs a lot into 80 pages, including discussions of the Islamic State, Yemen, Osama bin Laden, 9/11, Marxism, and the diminishment of morality. The world, writes the author, is divided into the lucky and the unlucky. The latter have a perpetual grievance against the former, which is why no one should be surprised when, say, followers of Islam rise up against Western powers or when British and European Muslims react against “the suffering of fellow Muslims in Gaza or Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan.” Shawn offers suggestions for a better civilization but with the caveat that he doubts such a world will ever come about. Though the narrative structure feels random at times, readers can’t deny the veracity of the author’s claims, and many will share his anger when he writes about “egomaniacs who are always ready to scoop up power for their own warped purposes.”
Not an optimistic picture but perceptive and forcefully argued.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60846-812-6
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
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
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