One quibble: in a book that cries out for illustrations, why repeat the same line drawing of a house exterior at the opening...
How our living spaces affect our behavior—that is, how they support or hinder our lives—is the question explored here.
Cultural critic and journalist Gallagher, who examined the broader question of how the larger environment influences our moods and behaviors in The Power of Place (1993), has now narrowed her focus to how the houses we live in make us feel. Feeling at home in a house, she says, has less to do with aesthetic fashion than with cultural and personal needs and inclinations that we may be largely unaware of. Her “psychological house tour of the American home” proceeds one room at a time, with most chapters opening with a description of an especially noteworthy or famous one. Thus she takes the reader into the idiosyncratic entry hall at Jefferson’s Monticello, Abigail Adams’s colonial kitchen, Longfellow’s impressive dining room, Edith Wharton’s private bedroom—and Hugh Hefner’s more public one. Gallagher, who visited dozen of architects, draws on their work and on that of environmental designers, psychologists, ecologists and primatologists to discover just how our homes can best support us in our daily lives. She considers the function of each room; how the needs of sociability and privacy must be balanced for maximum personal comfort; and the benefits of contrasting small and large, high and low and quiet and busy. Gallagher also recounts the history of various spaces, showing how technology and lifestyle changes have shaped and reshaped our bathrooms, kitchens and basements. She winds up with a brief consideration of the nearby natural world and the psychological benefits of a second home close to nature, and finally, a sketchy look at the pros and cons of suburban neighborhoods. Between chapters, she inserts brief essays about her own home and the changes she made once she began examining it from an environmental-behavioral point of view, a technique that goes far towards reassuring the reader that making one’s house more you-reflective and more user-friendly is no big deal.
One quibble: in a book that cries out for illustrations, why repeat the same line drawing of a house exterior at the opening of each chapter?Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-053869-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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