A preachy, uninspired tract on the technological, moral, and media changes in America, by Wired magazine's media critic. In his 1995 bestseller, Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte established a difficult precedent: He showed that a writer for the hip magazine Wired could publish a forward-looking sermon on the digital revolution, and that people would care. Unfortunately, Katz fails in a similar endeavor. His exhortation on media old and new, and the backlash by conservatives against their purportedly nefarious impact on our culture, is redundant, dull, and, in parts, mean-spirited. Early on, Katz identifies his enemy as the Mediaphobe, the conservative moral hand-wringer who fears the changes brought by new technologies. From there, Katz moves briskly through discussions of paranoia about online sexual content, violence in the mass media, the Simpson trial, and the decline of the old media. Along the way, lots of obvious truths are served up as novel insights. For instance, the author presents all of the familiar figures and trends that signify the decline of newspapers. Since there's nothing really new here, Katz has to sharpen his rhetorical sword. The victim is William Bennett, ``King of the Mediaphobes,'' whom he devotes an entire chapter to trashing. Without explaining the mystifying popularity of tomes such as The Book of Virtues, Katz writes that ``it's hard to think of more irrelevant exercises for hard-pressed contemporary children . . . than these bloated collections of clichÇs.'' The rest of the chapter is just as ruthless, accusing Bennett of moral intimidation and hypocrisy. To be fair, there are some interesting points tucked into Katz's book, like a short discussion of pioneer journalist Thomas Paine and how he might view the Internet were he alive today. Katz also makes good (but not very original) suggestions to the mainstream media on how it can reform itself. But most of Virtuous Reality comes off as old material repackaged and peppered with some vituperative commentary. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-44913-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
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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