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
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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