A compassionate, measured voice that serves as an antidote to strident pontificating.
A poet turns to the essay to consider the role of the individual in contemporary American democracy.
Portland, Oregon–based Willis (A Long Late Pledge, 2017) worked as a public defender and law clerk before transferring her energy to poetry, and her best essays combine rigor with sensory observation, ranging widely among varied interests. “Reckoning with the Bros: Donald Trump, Robert Bly, and Swimming in the Sea of Grief” may take a predictably appalled attitude toward Trump, but it also articulates the author’s complicated feelings toward Bly, whose combination of poetry and social action inspired but differs from hers. This essay, like several of the others, includes passages of poetry that illuminate the discussion. In “Where the World I Know and the World I Fear Threaten to Meet,” Willis uses passages from the work of Walt Whitman, Tracy K. Smith, and Ta-Nehisi Coates to support the argument that we ought to “face up to our fragility rather than shun it—or worse—hide it from one another.” Willis also exhibits a bracing, wry sense of humor. One especially intriguing section, “A Gnostic Bill of Rights,” considers several of her favorite rights from the Bill of Rights in her “own idiosyncratic order.” The Third Amendment, for example, she translates as “if a guy in camo and combat boots shows up at your door demanding pizza and a pull-out couch, you're free to refuse.” Because many of the essays collected here have been previously published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, and elsewhere, certain key ideas repeat frequently. Some of them, written for a decidedly liberal Portland audience, can be parochial, but for the most part, Willis resists falling for any pat agenda. She is as likely to call out her friends and neighbors as her political opponents for their close-minded reactions.
A compassionate, measured voice that serves as an antidote to strident pontificating.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64009-151-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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