Former New York Times correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner Shipler (Arab and Jew, 1986; Russia, 1983) reports from the front line where black and white America collide, divide, overlap, and, too rarely, coexist. Shipler's reportage includes much concrete information garnered from both sides of the racial divide, but his primary goal is didactic and his primary audience is white. If whites gain insight through this book into what it is like to be black in America, they will also learn ``what it is like to be white,'' he writes; armed with that self-knowledge, they might then help right a society in which racial differences continue to frustrate the fulfillment of the American dream. Shipler quotes scholars and activists, but mostly he talks to ordinary Americans. He visits high schools and colleges, police stations and army barracks, boardrooms and secretarial pools, integrated neighborhoods and even integrated families. He finds that whites tend to be uncomfortable discussing race, but that it is an ever-present issue for most of the blacks he talks to. What this white man learns from black Americans makes this a stunning and major work. Shipler reveals starkly and with deep sympathy how blacks still feel they must be on constant guard, even in an era in which institutionalized racism has largely disappeared, and how programs designed to heal the racial divide, such as affirmative action, are under attack from Americans who claim the country no longer has a racial problem. And if Shipler finds that some blacks go to such extremes as becoming racists themselves in pressing their claims, the vast majority long simply for a safe world into which to bring their children. A powerful book that should fulfill Shipler's goal of strengthening the ``tenuous strands of caring across the line that runs through the heart of America.'' (First printing of 60,000; Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-394-58975-0
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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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