A magnificent work of engaged scholarship analyzing hunger in modern America and the private and public responses to it. Poppendieck (Sociology/Hunter Coll.; Breadlines Knee Deep in Wheat, not reviewed) deals here with the seeming paradox that “poverty grows deeper as our charitable responses to it multiply.” Amid the myriad problems of the poor, we have chosen as a society to focus on hunger. Private, volunteer responses have been vigorous and grown exponentially; today there are tens of thousands of food programs in the US, sponsored by organizations as diverse as the Boy Scouts, postal workers, religious institutions, and credit card companies. Clearly, we care, and Poppendieck does nothing to question the sincerity of such efforts, only their efficacy. She finds we have retreated to charity rather than confront the fundamental causes of hunger and poverty. Growing job insecurity in a time of globalizing and downsizing, reductions in the purchasing power of minimum wage and public assistance, and—most especially, for the author—the unrelenting attack on programs and entitlements for the poor, have created an inequality in the US greater than at any time since WWII. Volunteer food programs thus attack only a symptom of poverty and at the same time contribute to this poverty. They do so by allowing us to focus our energy on immediate need; they sap the energy of activists who might otherwise devote more of their time to advocacy efforts on behalf of the poor. Finally, such food programs let government off the hook, allowing it to ignore its responsibility to foster a more just and equitable society. The author examines all of these themes in detail through documentary research but also through “participant observation.” She works in soup kitchens and food banks. She interviews food recipients in their homes and neighborhoods. She brings to life the interactions of giver and receiver, creating a stunning tableau of kindness and desperation. The most important book on hunger and poverty in America since Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1964).
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88020-5
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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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