A well-documented portrait of a little-examined group.
Newman, who studied the working poor in No Shame in My Game (1999), turns her attention to aging in the inner city.
Many elderly urban dwellers have cycled in and out of poverty during their lives, working at jobs that offer no pension of any kind. They may not have participated in the workforce long enough to quality for Social Security benefits, and there’s no carefree retirement for those serving as sole caretakers of their grandchildren. Focusing on New York City neighborhoods, the author interviews African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans aged 50 and up, creating a compelling look at the passage to old age. Members of this generation were more upwardly mobile than their parents, finding jobs as factory workers, secretaries, security guards, and civil servants. But that mobility, Newman (Urban Studies/Kennedy School of Government, Harvard) points out, was interrupted by the crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-’80s. Still working during those years, many older urbanites used their own meager resources to raise their adult children’s offspring; as a group, they were nearly as devastated as the addicts. In addition, people living in poor communities are more likely to suffer from diseases such as diabetes, asthma, and cancer—bad news for those who don’t have health insurance. Despite these dismal statistics, the men and women interviewed display a strong sense of community, family ties, and self-confidence. Using family connections and “fictive” kin arrangements, these elders create complex networks to which they can contribute (when they are working and have good health) and which sustain them when they need assistance. Newman has a variety of suggestions for helping those who have “spent their lives flipping our burgers or selling us toothpaste in jobs that provided no private pensions at all.” She supports restructuring Social Security to better provide for widows; additional monies for the Medicaid and Medicare systems; and a raise in kinship care stipends to match those of foster care.
A well-documented portrait of a little-examined group.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-56584-615-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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