Even those who find the jeremiad too strident should be impressed with the manner by which Millman connects the dots.
A true-crime account of an Arctic mass murder in the 1940s blends subtly with a prophecy about the dangers of cyberaddiction.
Millman (Giant Polypores and Stoned Reindeer, 2013, etc.) writes about remote places with an ecologist’s conscience, and he has expressed a preference for destinations beyond the reach of Google. So it’s easy to see how this little-known tragedy came to obsess him and to appreciate how he skillfully provides parallels to contemporary times on the dangers of one culture infiltrating another. He quotes George Bernard Shaw on the Bible as “the most dangerous book on earth” and shows how it became so within one isolated Inuit community. A meteor shower convinced some that the end of the world was near, and one man convinced his neighbors that he was Jesus incarnate and that another man was God. What happened next horrified and embarrassed the Inuit culture, and they did their best to forget it, while the Canadian justice system treated it differently than if the crimes were committed outside the culture rather than within it. But as one of the natives the author met suggested, “try to kill the past and it will get stronger and more angry…like a polar bear you’ve shot and only wounded.” Millman’s investigation details how “God” and “Jesus,” along with others, began to see signs of “Satan” among their neighbors and ended up committing or ordering multiple murders of those possessed by the devil. Some were acquitted on temporary insanity, while others were given wrist-slap sentences for lesser offenses such as manslaughter. “By comparison, the Salem witchcraft trials could claim only one Satan,” writes the author. Providing contemporary context, the author chronicles one of his exploratory visits to the Arctic, which coincided with 9/11. Millman sees the internet and the cyberculture surrounding it as the new Bible and its worshippers destroying the culture it has ostensibly improved.
Even those who find the jeremiad too strident should be impressed with the manner by which Millman connects the dots.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11140-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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