Good intentions pave the way to the usual place in this unpleasant collection of fawning interviews with exLos Angeles gang members. There is an art to good interviewing, and husband-and-wife team Jah and Shah'Keyah (Nation Conscious Rap, not reviewed) simply don't possess it. Like high school newspaper cub reporters, they lob merciless softball questions at their subjects: ``What are some positive things that you are now doing in the community?'' or ``Speak on the potential impact of brothers from all over getting with the brotherhood.'' And while they allow the gangstaz to ramble on at great length, Jah and Shah'Keyah manage to elicit little of real substance from them beyond an assortment of platitudes about the need for peace and love and black solidarity. These sentiments, somehow, are not convincing. Few of these ex-gangsters seem particularly penitent about their numerous crimes, preferring instead to cast themselves as sorely put-upon victims. A ceaseless racist sputter is allowed to pass unremarked, much of it infected by the ``white devils'' teachings of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam. In the hands of more skilled interviewers, a fascinating book could have been written from the lives of these men. They have, after all, managed to survive one of the deadliest fratricidal conflicts this side of the Balkans, a through-the- looking-glass world where walking in the wrong neighborhood can mean an instant death sentence, where those who make it past 21 are considered old men. Now, in the wake of the 1992 LA riots, there is an uneasy truce among the various gangs, and the killingthough it hasn't stoppedhas abated. A great deal of this book is addressed to maintaining this shaky peace and building upon it. But hatred, inanity, and incompetence help no one. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80460-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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
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
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