Lim is a single-minded and enthusiastic advocate for the common and public ownership of land.
A journalistic account of the impact of private land ownership on the environment and on people’s quality of life.
“America is synonymous with private property,” writes Lim, a Brooklyn-based freelance writer. And, she states more boldly, “the commodification of land is driving many of America’s most intransigent problems.” Historically, Native Americans were dispossessed by European settlers and, later, by the federal government, and former enslaved people were promised and then denied land reparations, condemning them to sharecropping servitude. Today, developers purchase land in low-income and working-class neighborhoods and erect luxury buildings, fueling gentrification and its accompanying high rents and shrinking supply of affordable housing. Lim asserts that the public will be served and the environment protected only when land is publicly owned, such that governments are accountable, or placed in community land trusts. She builds her case on evidence from events in the country’s history and stories of grassroots organizations such as the Indian Creek Community Forest in Oregon; the Somali Bantu Community Association (concerned with farmland security) in Lewiston, Maine; the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury, Massachusetts; and the Northern Farmers of Color Land Trust in Minnesota. Lim’s reports from her journalistic travels through the U.S. and Canada are woven with stories of growing up in Calgary, her family history, and her current life in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The accounts she presents, though, belie her claim “that land is rarely talked about as a social or economic issue today.” And her assumption that many of America’s intransigent problems are attributable to land ownership and to how the country’s opportunities and resources are distributed would have been more credible if tempered by discussion of their entanglement in matters of race, class, and political ideology.
Lim is a single-minded and enthusiastic advocate for the common and public ownership of land.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781250275189
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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 familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.
Portraits in a post-pandemic world.
After the Covid-19 lockdowns left New York City’s streets empty, many claimed that the city was “gone forever.” It was those words that inspired Stanton, whose previous collections include Humans of New York (2013), Humans of New York: Stories (2015), and Humans (2020), to return to the well once more for a new love letter to the city’s humanity and diversity. Beautifully laid out in hardcover with crisp, bright images, each portrait of a New Yorker is accompanied by sparse but potent quotes from Stanton’s interviews with his subjects. Early in the book, the author sequences three portraits—a couple laughing, then looking serious, then the woman with tears in her eyes—as they recount the arc of their relationship, transforming each emotional beat of their story into an affecting visual narrative. In another, an unhoused man sits on the street, his husky eating out of his hand. The caption: “I’m a late bloomer.” Though the pandemic isn’t mentioned often, Stanton focuses much of the book on optimistic stories of the post-pandemic era. Among the most notable profiles is Myles Smutney, founder of the Free Store Project, whose story of reclaiming boarded‑up buildings during the lockdowns speaks to the city’s resilience. In reusing the same formula from his previous books, the author confirms his thesis: New York isn’t going anywhere. As he writes in his lyrical prologue, “Just as one might dive among coral reefs to marvel at nature, one can come to New York City to marvel at humanity.” The book’s optimism paints New York as a city where diverse lives converge in moments of beauty, joy, and collective hope.
A familiar format, but a timely reminder that cities are made up of individuals, each with their own stories.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250277589
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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