Was the newspaper an instrument of liberation or control? Can any news be trusted? Is the free flow of information essential...
From imperial messenger and town crier to Citizen Kane: a vigorous history of the rise of the news business.
Who needs news, anyway? Well, writes Pettegree (Modern History/Univ. of St. Andrews; The Book in the Renaissance, 2010, etc.), first there is the potentate, who needs to know the doings in the far corners of the realm. Then there’s the merchant, who needs to know conditions in distant markets, the better to buy low and sell high. The author first examines such fledgling news enterprises as the couriers of European rulers and entrepreneurs, who, it can be surmised, were not always trustworthy, given the advantage they found in controlling what news was released and when. He then turns to such pioneers as the curious (in both senses) Cologne burger Herman Weinsberg, who kept dossiers on his relatives and neighbors: “It was only after his death that his appalled family members discovered that he had memorialised all their doings in an expansive chronicle of their lives and times.” Weinsberg also gathered accounts of political events, noting the importance of what emerged as a significant theme in Pettegree’s book: the integrity of the teller. The author takes a refreshingly broad view of what constitutes journalism—he includes medieval balladeers in the mix, for “singing ballads was a powerful part of information culture”—and of the genealogy of problems that any old-school newspaperperson will recognize: from the proper balance of ads to editorial copy to making decisions on what to run and what to spike and, as always, reaching audiences whose members might not always have appreciated that they needed the news that was on offer.
Was the newspaper an instrument of liberation or control? Can any news be trusted? Is the free flow of information essential to a democracy? Learned and well-written, Pettegree’s book ventures fruitful answers.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-17908-8
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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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