Absorbing and enjoyably compelling research on the packrat conundrum in our society.
Quirky, immersive report on the “who, what, where, when, and why of junk.”
After spending months painstakingly sifting through knickknack boxes in her parents’ basement after the sale of the family home, journalist and TV host Stewart (First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School, 2013) contemplated the nature of obsession, nostalgia, and our compulsive reliance on personal “stuff.” Her entertaining three-year exploration spans U.S. Route 411 from central Alabama to Tennessee, a stretch of Southern highway that becomes a 250-mile-long yard sale teeming with hives of eccentrics and their roadside tchotchke stands during a four-day autumnal “junk-a-palooza.” There, and throughout the many homes and storage units she examined, Stewart understood that “the key element of true junk is worthlessness.” However, behind the dusty boxes and overstuffed bins are real people; some harbor serious psychological impairments, while others seem trapped in a collection cycle, surrounding and guarding themselves with a disposable, ever expanding bloom of ephemera. “Letting go is a common problem for people who have attachments to things they know they no longer need but secretly still like or even love,” the author writes as more complicated issues of compulsive hoarding, loneliness, and disposophobia surface in other sections of her accessible, enthusiastic study. She conducts amusing interviews with experts in the big business of eviction clean-outs, junk removal, and recycling, and she queries the troubled creator of a three-story interconnected colossus of objects and the executive producer of TV’s Pawn Stars. Particularly engrossing chapters spotlight groups dedicated to the science intersecting identity and possessions and a NASA expert on intergalactic space junk. In all fairness, Stewart concedes that “what qualifies as junk is subjective,” and throughout her lively observations, she consistently remains respectful to those on all levels of the stockpiling spectrum.
Absorbing and enjoyably compelling research on the packrat conundrum in our society.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61373-055-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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