At turns serious and humorous, this multifaceted collection of essays will entertain both longtime Savage fans and new...
Personal and political essays from the columnist and gay rights advocate.
Though Savage may best be known as an advice columnist, he is as opinionated about gun violence, Obamacare and assisted suicide as he is about sex education, same-sex marriage and bisexuality. Despite the wide range of subject matter, his general approach to each topic, which can be boiled down to "the more freedom, the better," is consistent. This consistency, along with his technique of frequently giving examples from his personal life, prevents the essays from becoming disjointed. Savage is no stranger to controversy, and he recants his previous stance on male bisexuality, sets the record straight on his part in Rick Santorum's "Google Problem," and tells readers what happened when he invited Brian Brown, head of the anti-gay National Organization for Marriage, over for dinner. Though the political essays are incisive, Savage is at his most interesting and provocative when discussing sexuality. He argues that gay people should not race to portray themselves as exclusively wholesome when criticized as sexually depraved, and he writes that rushing to emphasize "PTA meetings and baking cookies" glosses over the fact that "we are different…gay people seem to have a much easier time reconciling love and lust, commitment and desire." Savage sees comfort and openness with sexuality as something straight people should emulate, not fear, and encourages readers to be open to "monogamish" relationships as a way of saving relationships that might otherwise be destroyed over one incident of infidelity. Some essays are weaker than others: “Sex Dread,” about sex education in America, is underdeveloped, and “The Choicer Challenge” has as much material in the footnotes as in the text, which is distracting.
At turns serious and humorous, this multifaceted collection of essays will entertain both longtime Savage fans and new readers.Pub Date: May 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-525-95410-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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