An I Love Lucy to Cheers run-through of sitcom as both product and ``foggy'' mirror of our corporate culture, by the coauthor of The Beaver Papers and The Comic Book Heroes (neither reviewed). Jones considers situation comedies over the past four decades against a broad-brushed cultural setting, arguing that sitcom ``ideals''—particularly the ``consensual solution''—are those ``on which modern bureaucratic business and government are founded.'' ``The most successful,'' he claims, possess ``a particularly shrewd insight into the concerns of the vast American public.'' Jones champions the pioneering 1951 Lucy and its ``theater of battle'' (``the mad housewife,'' he says, ``never favored the `corporate' resolutions''), and rails against the artificial, sugary, suburban moral lesson of Father Knows Best. That show and some of its many imitators (e.g., Bachelor Father, Leave it to Beaver, and The Dick Van Dyke Show) he calls ``strangely seductive horrors,'' ``products of profound national confusion masquerading as confidence.'' As Jones analyzes the premises and plots of Dobie Gillis, The Beverly Hillbillies, Bewitched, Maude, etc., he also offers such interesting TV facts as that, in both 1968 and 1969, the networks passed up All in the Family—which, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, abandoned ``postwar optimism.'' Jones is at his best when homing in on what makes particular shows and characters tick—pinpointing The Honeymooners' ``venom of a frustrated Brooklyn blue-collar marriage,'' or Leave It To Beaver's ``funniest and sharpest creation'': the ``pathetically ridiculous'' Eddie Haskell. But the author is less convincing when he sees ``the rebellious currents....hinted at'' by Eddie as forerunners to SDS and a ``nascent women's liberation movement.'' In early 1991, Jones notes, Cheers, that clubhouse ``for the alienated,'' still held its own against the ``feel-good'' Cosby show. Competent but uneven, and perhaps overly demanding of the most popular form of American TV as sociological oracle. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8021-1308-7
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
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