Two members of the much-maligned Generation X answer four years of media condescension with a cogent, though flawed, economic analysis. Since 1990, the mainstream media have been scolding the current crop of adult Americans under 30 for their lack of ambition, their immaturity, and their ``clingy'' tendency to move in with their parents after graduation. Lipsky (Three Thousand Dollars, 1989) and Abrams, a New York City attorney, argue that the problems of their generation are neither psychological nor cultural. What distinguishes this generation from those who came of age in past decades, they insist, is a lack of white-collar economic opportunity. The authors explain how federal policies of the 1970s and '80s have affected the prospects of people now in their 20s; their chapter on student loans (examining, for instance, how those loans contributed to rising tuition costs) is particularly convincing. Yet they fail to buttress their arguments with hard numbers: Tracking the job market for graduating college seniors from 1980, they characterize each year as ``okay,'' ``good,'' ``soft,'' or ``awful,'' offering no concrete idea of what percentages those words represent. Where Late Bloomers is even more disappointing, however, is in the authors' reluctance to recognize the limits of a strictly economic analysis. Throughout the book, they equate marriage and children with material success, claiming that their generation delays or eschews such commitments solely for financial reasons, thus ignoring the profound ways in which second- wave feminism and the sexual revolution have changed attitudes toward marriage. Feminism in general gets short shrift, and the sexual revolution is dismissed in less than a page as a misguided experiment. Abrams and Lipsky assume that everyone in their generation wants the same things; given that they're writing about 46 million people, they can't possibly be right. (First serial to Harper's; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8129-2290-5
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1994
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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