Short on juicy secrets, long on tedium.
New Yorker staff writer Robbins (co-author, Quarterlife Crisis, not reviewed) stretches a few secrets of the Yale secret society into a dreary extended narrative.
Herself a Yale grad and member of another such club (unnamed), the author begins with a dull history of the university and its hidden organizations. In 1832, William Russell returned to New Haven after study in Germany bearing the fundamentals of a secret society that used a death's head as its logo. The Order of Skull and Bones became the school's most prestigious club and retains that aura today; the 15 men and (since 1991) women inducted each year join a long list of distinguished Americans. Robbins describes the organization’s bonding methods. A private building, called a tomb, provides a safe haven for members. (An art restorer who repaired food-splattered paintings reports that it looks like most frat houses but with thicker walls and more morbid furnishings.) Skull and Bones pins with the number “322” are worn by members; 1832 was the year of origin, and “2” refers to Yale’s branch being the second one after the Germans’. Skull and Bones time is five minutes ahead of the rest of the world, but 1,802 years behind; current documents are dated D200. Only seniors join; each year's group chooses the next 15. Influenced by Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy, the initiation is led by a senior acting as Uncle Toby. Intense personal discussions and boodleball (soccer played in the large dining room) create lifelong bonds among the 15 and with their predecessors, known as Patriarchs. A month after his inauguration, George Bush senior invited the surviving Bonesmen of his year to a White House reunion. At least 58 members donated money to the presidential campaign of Bush junior (Bones 1968). Humorless and emotionally bland throughout, Robbins's prose sucks the vitality out of the story: privileged college students must be having more fun than we see here.
Short on juicy secrets, long on tedium.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-316-72091-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
