Literate, sophisticated, and plenty ticked-off: vintage Lapham, and a ringing endorsement of First Amendment freedoms.
The noted contrarian takes on a presidency that seems devoted to taking the path of least resistance.
On December 6, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft had this to say to Harper’s magazine editor Lapham’s fellow antinomian types: “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.” Sure of the salutary power of dissent, Lapham (Lapham’s Rules of Influence, 1999, etc.) works those phantoms hard, cataloguing all the ways in which Bush and company, having donned the purple robes of empire, are busily taking new and novel views of the Constitution at the expense of our liberties. Lacking the president’s certainty that the deity endorses the government’s program, Lapham urges his readers to understand that “dissent consists of nothing else except the right to say no . . . the freedom to conceive of the future as an empty canvas or a blank page.” That empty canvas or blank page may not always deliver good news, may not always shield us from the risks that the Patriot and Homeland Security Acts are ostensibly meant to ward off; such bits of legislation, Lapham asserts, merely “aspire to a new and improved system of bureaucratic control that joins the paranoid systems of thought engendered by the Cold War with the surveillance techniques made possible by the miracles of our digitally enhanced telecommunications technology.” Not that there aren’t risks out there, Lapham acknowledges; it is simply that democracy inevitably suffers when no one steps up to defend it. But Lapham is hopeful: though self-rule is hard and autocracy the very definition of the path of least resistance, the electorate “is by no means as dumb or as disinterested as dreamed of in the philosophy of Karl Rove.” Which, of course, remains to be seen.
Literate, sophisticated, and plenty ticked-off: vintage Lapham, and a ringing endorsement of First Amendment freedoms.Pub Date: June 21, 2004
ISBN: 1-59420-017-3
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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