Strange, unusual in form and dislocating—especially if you have an older-model linear mind. For those qualities alone, this...
“There’s no shopping in Star Wars.” But then, where does Luke Skywalker get all his cool gear? That’s a question that this provocative book never fully answers.
Novelist Coupland (Worst. Person. Ever., 2014, etc.) takes a cue from fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan in serving up stern little sound bites, starkly illustrated sometimes as black-and-white graphics, sometimes as captions to jarring, even apocalyptic photographs: “Healthy people are bad for capitalism.” “In the future everywhere will be Detroit.” “Rodney King was the YouTube of 1993.” Swiss curator and futurist Obrist (Ways of Curating, 2014) joins the fun, content to keep things oracular and, well, McLuhan-esque. If you have a copy of The Gutenberg Galaxy to hand, you’ll have the idea, save for this book speaks to a future that may not be entirely pleasing, especially to the older set, whose minds have not been remade, courtesy of the Internet and such, into latticework things. The future is unevenly distributed: In much of the world Coupland and company present, chaos and total, constant war hold sway, people are bored (which favors the outbreak of war), disconnected and Internet-addicted, and the hive mind rules. And then there are those Fukushima-style cataclysms to worry about: “The Earth begins to quake and quake and our planet is converted into a perpetual jiggling smoothie….” Slogans are useful, but they beg for discussion even as they preclude the possibility of discussion. Thus a statement such as “Technology often favors horrible people” goes unelaborated. It may be true, but lacking an example to hang the idea on, readers are forced to take things on faith—and the best vision of the future allows for evidence and trust with verification, courtesy of search engines and smart people.
Strange, unusual in form and dislocating—especially if you have an older-model linear mind. For those qualities alone, this is worth a look, though its hipper-than-thou self-satisfaction runs close to the surface of a superficial book.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17386-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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