This collection of essays and reviews from the New Criterion's last six years represents both the best and the worst that ideologically charged criticism has to offer. For 12 years now, the New Criterion has manned the neoconservative barricades in America's culture wars. The clumsily written introduction by the editors refers rather cryptically to the absence of Bruce Bawer, whose scintillating literary essays were once the high point of almost every issue. He and Jed Perl (whose dissenting pieces on Anselm Kiefer and Mike Kelly are included here) were the two true discoveries of the magazine. Bawer's withdrawal corresponds to cultural forces now splitting conservative thought between those willing and those not willing to appease the radical right. Kramer and Kimball, two of the more ham- fisted authors here, echo the bellicose rhetoric that was once the province of the intellectual left, spewing screeds as ineffectual as the drivel of the most rabble-rousing neo-Stalinoids. To their credit, these embittered critics on the right have functioned as public intellectuals, writing for common readers and not just one another. At their best, they have debunked some of the worst trends within the university today, from the inanities of Afrocentrism (Terry Teachout on Houston Baker) to the cult of those French intellectual high priests, Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard (Kimball and Richard Vine, respectively). That political correctness pervades the cultural elite is a given among these writers, and many essays demonstrate its corrosive effect on contemporary art (essays by New Criterion stalwarts Perl, Karen Wilkin, and Eric Gibson), music (work by the late publisher Samuel Lipman), and theater (Donald Lyons on Angels in America). Not all the career assessments are negative: Included are definitive essays on Frederick Douglass, T.E. Lawrence, and Max Beerbohm—all of which cut through the obfuscations of academic critics. The worst note is struck by the editors, who would do well to subject their work to someone else's editorial scrutiny. Otherwise, an invaluable introduction to this most necessary of journals.
Pub Date: March 3, 1995
ISBN: 1-56663-069-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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
PERSPECTIVES
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
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