An intriguing attempt at cutting through the dissonance of a series of changing cultural milieus.
Sprawling examination of how American society has responded to multiculturalism and demographic diversity.
Chang (Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation, 2005), the executive director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford, focuses on visual artists and political dreamers in narrating how once-marginalized communities responded to the civil rights movement and then to the white backlash promoted by Richard Nixon and Republican strategist Lee Atwater. Amid violence and generational strife, cultural happenings, such as the Black Arts movement of the late 1960s, and innovators like African-American cartoonist Morrie Turner fomented “a grand yearning, a mass becoming, an end to the monoculture, the true arrival of a post-segregated nation.” Corporations quickly co-opted this outsider aesthetic, a process famously embodied in the early ’70s by Coca-Cola. Chang discusses important yet forgotten nodes in the developing dichotomy of multiculturalism versus “culture war,” as when conservatives began attacking the National Endowment for the Arts during the ’80s: “Defunding public culture proved good Republican politics.” Yet simultaneously, Jesse Jackson “incepted into the mainstream the prophetic images of the rainbow” in his attempts to make the Democratic Party more inclusive. The triumph of “political correctness” seemed evident in the fierce controversies over the Whitney Biennials of the ’90s, while Benetton’s successful “Colors” ad campaign and magazine showed that “capitalism had at long last embraced its future in identity and diversity.” As the Clinton years approached their end, “everything and nothing was multicultural,” contrasting with the triumphalism and xenophobia that followed 9/11. Chang ends with a jaundiced portrait of the “hope” accompanying Barack Obama’s presidency, smothered by conservative resentment and a massive economic crisis. The author adeptly synthesizes other scholars’ research and has an eye for precise details, though he also relies on a labored fusion of academic sociology and urban buzzwords—e.g., “In this era of fragmentation and unrest, it was time for [Coca-Cola]…to reassert some alpha swag.”
An intriguing attempt at cutting through the dissonance of a series of changing cultural milieus.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-312-57129-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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