by Dan Savage ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2002
“There are millions of ethical, fully moral sinners in America,” says he. Thank heavens.
As he strides proudly through Gomorrah—be that New York City or Dubuque—The Stranger editor Savage (The Kid, 1999) sings the praises of American freedom and American sinners, and sends a little “bitch slap” across the righteous cheeks of Messrs. Bork, Bennett, and Buchanan.
The self-appointed virtuecrats—add Falwell and Schlessinger to the list—take pride (woops, there’s a sin) in giving orders to us sinners. They’d like to amend the Constitution and pass laws against the sins we hold dear. Savage would like them to know, however, that one paleo-conservative’s sin may be another man’s pleasure, and the pursuit of happiness is one of the rights we hold self-evident. Is the US a moral sewer and cultural wasteland? How are the Deadly Sins across the land? Savage takes each of the mortal seven and reports on one aspect of each. Greed finds him in Dubuque, doing a little gambling, losing a modest boodle, and feeling an aliveness that comes with participatory risk. Lust finds him with swingers, but mostly brooding on the consequences of monogamy, like the right and wrong ways to commit adultery. Being gay, he takes unconditional gay pride to task (“it doesn’t matter that a person is gay, it matters how a person is gay”), while sloth—and occasional pot smoking—is given a plus for its place in an overworked world. Gluttony, envy, and anger (the last allowing him to say intelligent things about handguns) seem largely an opportunity to spin some funny stories, and there are plenty of them, often at the author’s own expense. Common sense is Savage’s strong suit, and he makes more of it than a preening moralist ever could. Despite the night in NYC when he tries to commit all seven sins, moderation is his gambit: “Moderation in all things, that’s my motto, and I believe it applies to moderation itself.”
“There are millions of ethical, fully moral sinners in America,” says he. Thank heavens.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-94675-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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by Dan Savage
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edited by Dan Savage
by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales
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by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez
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by Howard Zinn
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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