A fit of nostalgia and self-aggrandizement disguised as a generational call to arms.
The author launched his career as a social critic with a much-discussed Details essay that asked, “Has Generation X Already Peaked?” Here’s the answer (no), now bloated to book length.
According to Gordinier, without Gen X’s contributions to music, art, film, sociology and, most importantly, technology, society would be a vastly different place. That’s a reasonable response to loud critics who have called X the “slacker generation.” It’s also almost as obvious and amorphous as the author’s broader thesis that just as past generations have defined their eras, so too has X defined ours. Gordinier undermines his defense with a meandering argument that reads like a lengthy self-applied pat on the back. The many pop references, carefully selected so his peers will be sure to get them, are not notable for their shrewd insights. The author apparently thinks Kurt Cobain was the first rock star ever to be overwhelmed by the misery of sudden fame. He likens Paris Hilton to the bad kids in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (the 1971 movie, that is, from which “vast numbers of Generation Xers learned all their moral lessons”). He treats us to the hot-off-the-presses revelation that Quentin Tarantino’s filmmaking is shaped not by a graduate degree, but by all those movies the director-to-be watched while working in a video store. Given Gordinier’s inability to move beyond his own tastes, accomplishments and even angst, it’s not too surprising that the misleading opening section, “Quick First-Person Tangent,” takes up more than half of the book. The author is actually a decent representative for the generation he seeks to defend: He traveled to Prague on a whim to take part in the Velvet Revolution and eschewed graduate school to become a rock journalist. Unfortunately, his disproportionate attention to his own memories skews his project.
A fit of nostalgia and self-aggrandizement disguised as a generational call to arms.Pub Date: March 31, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-670-01858-1
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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