Blunt and often revealing, though at times the author wanders off on personal tangents.
Web columnist Bageant returns to his hometown to investigate why a permanent underclass perennially votes to keep itself that way.
Having busted out decades ago to serve in the Navy and then live in hippie communes and on an Indian reservation, the author decided in his 50s to take stock of the situation back in Winchester, Va. There, the liberal-minded Bageant found the expected co-mingling of fundamentalists and rednecks (his words), often distinguishable from each other only in terms of whether alcohol was eschewed or abused. He spent time down at Burt’s Tavern holding his tongue while cataloging the hallmarks of a downtrodden, working-class community. While many struggle with chronic health problems and are just a lost paycheck or two away from homelessness, the author chronicles, they—or at least the minority who bother to vote— represent a solid block of support for the Republican Party and President Bush. Bageant personally sees the GOP as the font of economic policy designed to maintain, if not widen, the gap between America’s rich and poor. Here he attempts an analysis of the religious and social underpinnings that account for this apparent contradiction. He finds that, in this community, largely Scots-Irish, with a Calvinist Protestant tradition, prejudices are sustained and even propagated largely as a result of the sheer ignorance that is the inevitable outcome in a place where education has never been a priority. The town’s well-off clique of realtors, lawyers and business owners, the author further rants, sees no problem in maintaining its pool of “cheap hillbilly labor” exactly as it stands. His warning to other liberals: Stop overhyping gun control, but when it comes to the Christian evangelists’ push for theocracy in place of democracy, be very afraid.
Blunt and often revealing, though at times the author wanders off on personal tangents.Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-307-33936-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2007
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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