An interesting but very academic history of a polarizing media presence.
The rise and fall and plateau of a controversial media outlet’s attempt to penetrate the American market.
This well-researched but lackluster account of media conglomerate Al Jazeera’s attempts to make inroads to Western audiences started as a graduate school dissertation and largely still reads like one. Youmans (Media and Public Affairs/George Washington Univ.) tracks the burgeoning media network from its launch of Al Jazeera English in 2006 through the abrupt shuttering of Al Jazeera America in 2016. The author opens with an examination of the enormous regulatory and administrative hurdles the Qatar-backed channel had to overcome just to broadcast in the first place as well as the deep-rooted philosophical bias against the Middle East–based outlet in the wake of 9/11. Youmans argues that the best way to understand the arc of Al Jazeera is by diving into its distinct operations in Washington, D.C., New York City, and San Francisco, breaking down its mechanics at the local level in order to understand how it analyzes and affects the world. “The awkward portmanteau ‘glocalization’ refers to the co-occurrence of ‘universalizing and particularizing’ forces in the movement of global goods, people and services,” he writes. Unfortunately, for readers who are not media analysts, it doesn’t get much more exciting than this, barring a couple of exceptions. Youmans does take a bracing deep dive into the 2011 emergence of the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East, as Al Jazeera finally freed itself of the negative associations of the Gulf Wars and became a real presence on the global stage. Late in the book, the author also portrays the intriguing contrast between the now-defunct Al Jazeera America in New York City and its more daring digital startup, AJ+, which is still flourishing in the innovative media aquarium of San Francisco.
An interesting but very academic history of a polarizing media presence.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-065572-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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