A thoughtful, deft collection.
A take on the world.
In a gathering of 30 essays and talks from 2016 to early 2025, Smith reflects on arts and politics, aging and craft. Several pieces were informed by dismaying political events: Receiving a literary award from Kenyon College three days after the 2024 American election, Smith talked about the need to protect vulnerable people; in Austria, in 2018, when that country was turning to the political right, she spoke about multiculturalism, exemplified by the makeup of the British World Cup team. At a rally in London, she spoke about climate change denialism; and in an essay written before the July 4, 2024, British election, she reminded her readers about what the Labour Party should stand for, in light of increasing inequality. Politics and history infuse an essay on Kara Walker’s “mode of relating to the ruins of the past” and her forewords to reissues of Gretchen Gerzina’s Black England and James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan. Smith offers moving obituaries for writers she admires and has learned from: Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, and Hilary Mantel. The movie Tar inspires Smith to think about artistic monsters; artist Celia Paul’s memoir of her relationship with Lucien Freud elicits an essay about being, or resisting being, a muse. Smith reflects on her own writing in her foreword to her novel The Fraud, in an interview with a Spanish journalist, and in a talk on craft for a fiction workshop. She extols her beloved Kilburn, in London, and pays homage to New York, where she observes an unexpected sense of community when diverse New Yorkers jump in—silently and efficiently—to help a young mother whose baby carriage suddenly breaks. In that essay and others, Smith seems cautiously optimistic that “moral intelligence” will prevail in hard times.
A thoughtful, deft collection.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834688
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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