Harvard anthropologist Newman (Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream, 1993, etc.) authors a pathbreaking study of a neglected group of Americans: those who work yet remain mired in poverty. For two years Newman and her research assistants chronicled the lives of 300 workers and job-seekers at four fast-food restaurants in Harlem. Their results challenge many of the assumptions concerning poor people of the inner city. First and foremost, despite the ready alternatives of crime and welfare, this group as a whole cherishes that most American of ideals, working. They do so at minimum wage with heavy demands on them in terms of school, supporting of families, medical needs with no insurance coverage, and so much more. They persevere in the face of ridicule from peers and the public at large, who most often see “burger flipping” as demeaning mindless labor (though the author convincingly shows that these jobs do in fact demand skills that are to be admired). They persevere despite the fact that, while they desperately and actively seek to move on and up to better jobs, most won’t. These working poor are presented as a group but also as individuals, as Kyesha, Jamal, Carman, and so many others. None are saints but none fulfill the stereotype of an underclass that has given up on itself and its future. “The nation’s poor do not need their values engineered,” writes Newman, “they do not need lessons about the dignity of work.” What they need is help to overcome the anonymous barriers of race and class, the negative valuation of their work experience, the simple lack of enough good jobs to go around. In her conclusion, the author offers several recommendations that might, with minimal cost to government and private employers, help these workers realize some benefit from their belief in the dignity of labor. This is a work of major importance that policymakers and concerned citizens should read, need to read.
Pub Date: April 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40254-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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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