An opinionated and passionate book on one of the 20th century’s most important writers.
A scholar uses James Baldwin’s home in the south of France as a framework for addressing “the need for new interpretations” of the author’s life and writings.
Why is it, asks Zaborowska (Afroamerican and American Studies/Univ. of Michigan, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade, 2009, etc.), that there is no museum or archive dedicated to Baldwin? She finds this oversight shocking, especially given that Yale recently bought the papers of Jonathan Lethem, “a writer whose achievement and importance are clearly nowhere near Baldwin’s” and whose archive includes “a trove of drunken drawings of ‘vomiting cats.’ ” Zaborowska tries to correct the imbalance with this book. Her initial focus is Chez Baldwin, the house in Saint Paul-de-Vence where Baldwin lived from 1971 until his death in 1987, and the works he wrote there. She recounts visits to Baldwin’s home, including a 2014 stop when, “despite James’s dying wish to preserve it as a retreat for African Diaspora writers,” developers bulldozed the decaying property and “erected large, colorful billboards advertising soon-to-be-built luxury villas.” Zaborowska also notes the significant distinction that Baldwin, who lived most of his life outside the United States, makes between house and home: “His vision of America as a national house is far from optimistic, and his glimpses of private home spaces where those who do not fit normative narratives may find shelter are rarely lasting.” The second half of this book is devoted to multipage analyses of Baldwin’s late works, including If Beale Street Could Talk, The Devil Finds Work, and his final, unperformed play The Welcome Table. The book has its share of academic prose—e.g., “Baldwin’s representations of domesticity in Just Above [My Head] triangulate the notions of space, self, and story to build revolutionary shelters for non-normative black bodies”—but Zaborowska’s readings into Baldwin’s work are thoughtful and illuminating.
An opinionated and passionate book on one of the 20th century’s most important writers.Pub Date: April 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8223-6983-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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
PERSPECTIVES
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