Satirical, raw, and unapologetically real, West delivers the bittersweet truths on contemporary living.
A cornucopia of shrewd cultural observations from New York Times columnist West (Shrill: Notes From a Loud Woman, 2016).
In 18 pointed essays, the author addresses a variety of topics, including frivolous internet sensation Grumpy Cat, South Park, Guy Fieri, and the global significance of abortion rights and gender equality. In West’s opening tirade, she denounces Donald Trump’s repetitive usage of the term “witch hunt” while scrutinizing his uncanny “ability to conjure reality out of hot air and spittle.” This essay serves as the launching pad for further pieces exposing the sorry state of contemporary American politics and popular culture. Tough, irritated, and eager to speak her truth, the author expounds on the unifying aspects of visibility and activism to cultivate change, especially when countering the denigration of women. Her sharp wit and no-nonsense sense of humor also shine through her dissection of the work of Adam Sandler, Gwyneth Paltrow’s diet plan (her avocado smoothie “could give diarrhea an existential crisis”), and how movies like Clue shaped her perspectives and appreciation for one-liners and physical comedy. West rarely minces words, especially regarding documentaries on the Ted Bundy murders and the Fyre Festival or when expressing her sheer appreciation for the legacy of Joan Rivers, and her writing is fluid and multifaceted. Though she often rages at social injustice, she also becomes solemnly poetic when discussing her fondness for the drizzly Pacific Northwest, where she was raised and still resides, a place where she can still feel her deceased father’s presence “in the ridges and grooves of my city—we are close, superimposed, separated only by time, and what’s that? This is the only religion I can relate to.” Only occasionally are the smoothly written essays hijacked by intrusive asides—e.g., her experience inside a proselytizing Uber driver’s car, a scene wedged into her reflections on climate change. Though uneven at times, the author drives home the critical issues of our time while taking time to tickle our funny bones.
Satirical, raw, and unapologetically real, West delivers the bittersweet truths on contemporary living.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-44988-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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