Inspiring, insightful, and thoroughly readable.
A distinguished public radio producer’s collection of conversations with Americans who “found…their way to doing exactly what they were meant to do with their lives.”
StoryCorps founder Isay (Ties that Bind: Stories of Love and Gratitude from the First Ten Years of StoryCorps, 2013, etc.) discovered his calling as a radio broadcaster at age 22, just as he was about to begin medical school. In this book, he presents his conversations with people—ages 10 to 90 from different backgrounds and geographical locations in the United States—who discuss what makes work meaningful for them. The author culled these stories from thousands of interviews recorded over more than a decade, but many have neither been published nor broadcast until now. The first section, titled “Dreamers,” features discussions with people engaged in unusual occupations, such as street corner astronomer or bridge-tender, or in more conventional ones like doctor or astronaut that have required great personal sacrifice and commitment. In the second section, “Generations,” people talk about their work in a historical context. A father and son, for example, discuss their work as firefighters and the pride they take in being part of a family tradition of saving lives, while a New York–based sculptor tells her ex-husband about the artist mother who became her “greatest muse.” In the third section, “Healers,” Isay interviews people like an oncology nurse and a public defender, who help restore everything from broken bodies to damaged social systems. The fourth section, “Philosophers,” features stories from individuals—such as the accountant-turned–lox-slicer whose work brought him unexpected Zen-like peace—who have developed especially unique perspectives on life through the work they do. In the final section, “Groundbreakers,” the author provides stories about unsung professional pioneers. Two children of video game inventor Jerry Lawson, for example, discuss their father’s passion for experimenting even as diabetes came to rule, then claim, his life. Thoughtfully organized and edited, each story is a reminder of the essential role work plays in the pursuit of human happiness.
Inspiring, insightful, and thoroughly readable.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-518-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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