Courageous on-site reporting underlies all, outweighing some excess and irrelevance.
A contributing editor for Vice delivers on-the-scene, first-person accounts of the Western standoffs involving the Bundy family and their followers.
Pogue, a freelancer for the New York Times Magazine at the time, takes us with him inside the armed camp of those who were protesting the Bureau of Land Management—and the government in general—during the confrontations with the feds in Oregon early in 2016. He met and interviewed the Bundys, became close with a number of those encamped at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and felt his emotions ebb and flow, darken and lighten. A young man from Cincinnati, the author does not ignore his own youthful passions and weaknesses, including accounts of his drinking, drug use, sexual adventures, lassitude, and wanderlust. But he is interested principally in understanding the players in the movement led by the charismatic Ammon Bundy. Some, says Pogue, considered Bundy a prophet (many involved were Mormons), and the author is deeply sympathetic to the notion of increasing public access to public lands. He describes one experience, walking around a New Mexico site, camping, drinking, and firing his gun. (He had bought a big truck and some firearms and confesses a long fondness for both.) Pogue does allow some of his stories to drift past the point of interest, and throughout, he criticizes liberals who, in his view, don’t get what’s going on in the West but nonetheless, in ignorance, disdain it all. He also blasts—again and again—what he sees as the blindness of many Westerners who do not recognize the white male power that lies quietly behind so many of these issues. If public lands are sold off and used for mining and other endeavors, who will benefit? And who will suffer?
Courageous on-site reporting underlies all, outweighing some excess and irrelevance.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-16912-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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