The book may prove illuminating for patient readers, but Morris the scorned student is not Morris the filmmaker: He makes...
America’s favorite myth-buster settles an old—and very arcane—score.
In 1972, Morris (Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography, 2011, etc.) was nearly brained by a flying ashtray; his would-be assailant was the physicist Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The two were at odds over James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of the displacement current, but the dispute went much deeper: whether truth is real (Morris) or relative and beholden to “paradigm shift” (Kuhn). In the years since, Morris has become the lively documentarian who obsessively follows the strange paths truth can take (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, Tabloid, Wormwood et al.), and he has taken similar investigative trails in several books. Through it all, the Kuhn contretemps has apparently continued to gnaw at him; this book is his attempt at putting the matter to rest. For Morris, Kuhn’s legacy is little more than a general distrust of words and history. “For Kuhn, the meaning of words is endlessly in flux,” writes the author. “Changing your paradigm is not like changing your oil. You end up with a completely different set of meanings—except maybe you can’t know it, because the meanings are inaccessible to you.” Morris charges that Kuhn has likewise contributed to the “devaluation of scientific history” by arguing that truth isn’t so much discovered as created. The book can be tough sledding for readers a little shaky on modern trends in linguistic theory or historiography, and the constant digressions—Morris chases one rabbit after the next in footnotes stacked in the margins—can get annoying. One also senses a missed opportunity: In the era of fake news and alternative facts, the author might have made a stronger connection to the relativity of modern life.
The book may prove illuminating for patient readers, but Morris the scorned student is not Morris the filmmaker: He makes you work.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-226-92268-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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