Urgent, worthy reportage from our fractious, volatile social and cultural moment.
A penetrating multidisciplinary collection attacking today’s social fissures of privilege and inequality.
Former Granta editor Freeman (How to Read a Novelist, 2013, etc.), founder of the eponymous literary biannual, expands on a previous anthology regarding New York City’s inequality with this follow-up. “This is not just an urban problem,” he writes. “In smaller cities and towns and in rural America the gulf between the haves and have-nots stretches just as wide, even if its symptoms are not so visible.” While these parameters seem broad, Freeman’s mandate is fulfilled by the uniformly high quality of the contributors. Most address the topic obliquely, avoiding bombast in favor of grounded social narrative or the perspective offered by formative experience. Rebecca Solnit begins with a meticulous journalistic look at “Death by Gentrification,” in which a flashpoint of police violence in San Francisco revealed corrosive changes within trendy neighborhoods. In “Trash Food,” Chris Offutt connects his unease with intellectual condescension toward impoverished rural people with his own conflicts about identity: “As [Southern] cuisines gained popularity, the food itself became culturally upgraded.” Novelist Richard Russo addresses current politics more directly, noting that literature used to reflect engagement with a working class that now appears dismissed. “One can be sympathetic to Trump voters,” he writes, “without giving them a free pass.” Some pieces are directly autobiographical—e.g., Sandra Cisneros’ “Notes of a Native Daughter,” in which she writes, “Chicago’s Magnificent Mile made others feel magnificent but only made me ashamed of my shoes.” Others use the working writer’s unique situation as a lens for particular subtopics: Karen Russell’s long, affecting “Looking for a Home” portrays house-shopping in Portland during a homelessness epidemic as a moral challenge. Eula Biss’ powerful “White Debt” deftly wields financial metaphors. The anthology is rounded out with fiction and poetry from Joyce Carol Oates, Edwidge Danticat, Joy Williams, Kevin Young, Ann Patchett, Annie Dillard, Roxane Gay, Timothy Egan, and others.
Urgent, worthy reportage from our fractious, volatile social and cultural moment.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-14-313103-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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