A sharp diagnosis that offers few prescriptions.
A lucid if self-evident examination of the impact that cyberspace is having on America’s residential and commercial landscape, from trend-forecaster Kotkin (Tribes, 1993, etc.).
Now that the information industry—from media and entertainment to telecommunications and computers—has become a critical source of wealth, Kotkin explores how it has affected this country’s human geography. By its very mobility, the industry frees both homes and businesses from the tyranny of past requirements to be near ports, roads, rails, or raw materials. “Companies and people now locate not where they must but where they will,” Kotkin concludes reasonably. He goes on to describe some of the new venues: the “Valhallas” (pastoral paradises—such as Boulder, Colorado, and Park City, Utah—plugged into the information economy) and the “nerdistans” (“self-contained high-end suburbs that have grown up to serve the needs of both the burgeoning high-technology industries and their workers”). There’s also a movement to reclaim and enliven select urban cores, although the author foresees much retailing moving to the Internet and the public urban spaces made up of libraries, restaurants, performing-arts centers, schools, and service clubs. Though there will be some boutique retail establishments, most of the fine artisinal products will come from cyberspace: why shouldn’t artisans be as footloose as nerds? Though Kotkin is well aware of the widening gap between haves and have-nots in this picture (and understands how that is expressed along ethnic lines), he has little but windbaggery to offer in his suggestions about how to avoid the siege mentality that’s the inevitable product of gated communities: we must face “these problems with imagination and a sense of commitment,” with a “sense of civic spirit,” to convey a “sense of uniqueness and an investment in its future.”
A sharp diagnosis that offers few prescriptions.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50199-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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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