The date is the 50th anniversary of the moonwalk, 17 years ago (ergo, 33 years hence). The theme is what life will be like. The coverage is pure Clarke: heavy on the high tech; light on the arts. The tone, more Brave New World and Clockwork Orange than paradise gained. Take the chapter "An Afternoon on the Couch." Patient has been vaccinated against schizophrenia, taken her pills for mood control, is cued into a Rogerian analyst. Patients in 2019 are not your crazies and depressives, but suffer "inadequate worldviews," "subclinical anomie." Neurochemical and electrical workups tell it all, cure it all. Or the one on the bedroom—more mechanized orgasms, brain implants, push-button pleasure. . .with the promise that the best sex awaits zero-gravity undulations in space. As for school, work, home life, Clarke invokes what you might expect in the way of supercomputers and laserdiscs that will respond to your voice command and place the world's learning at your fingertips. Meanwhile, lovable robots will do the drudge work, provide companionship, and allow you leisure to pursue entertainments like movies that outdo each other in special effects or sports that will be based on a new breed of brainy/steroid-built superjocks. Had enough? Wait. Clarke also supplies his versions of hospital days and death-defying regimens. The scenarios here smack of Coma with illicit dealing in organ transplants, aborted babies as source of brain cells and so on. Clarke also hypothesizes war in 2019—an affair that starts as a rebellion in East Germany and escalates. An epilogue laments the decline in the United Nations, but sees hope in further developments of one of Clarke's own favorite: projects: satellite communications. It will make earth a global family yet, he predicts. This note of optimism and a long, Clarke-at-his-best description of life in a 2019 space station (based on present experience) lift the book out of the veil of joyless hardware.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0025258001
Page Count: 326
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1986
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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