A well-researched and often poignant survey of the discipline of sociology.
A range of sociologists offer practical applications of their science to lay readers in this nonfiction anthology.
“Sociology,” write editors Lindholm and Wood in this book’s introduction, “pulls back the curtain to reveal the communities, groups, and social structures that shape our lives.” Far too often, the book contends, sociology is overlooked by other disciplines or relegated to the ivory towers of universities. Yet, the contributors here—all scholarly, trained sociologists—assert that their field can help everyday people “live more meaningful lives.” Wood, who provides end-of-life doula services, describes how studying sociology helped her to contextualize her own depression and anxiety, as they’re connected to harmful expectations regarding roles and cultural norms, and Lindholm describes how sociology gave her “a purpose.” The book’s 45 essays are divided into eight parts that span topics that touch on class, education, and popular culture, and they often blend personal memoir with sociological insight. University of Washington professor Pepper Schwartz’s essay, for instance, reflects on her graduate training at Yale University, where she says she learned “hard lessons” about misogyny, class, and power through experiences with the elitist bulwark; Grace Kao, a Yale University professor, reflects on her love of K-pop music and how its popularity could reduce racist violence against Asian Americans. Other chapters break down complex sociological theories that people often willfully misconstrue in public debates, such as systemic racism and queer identity. Lindholm taught courses on inequality, diversity, and gender at Northwestern University, and Wood earned her doctorate in sociology from Brandeis University. The book also features work by many other academics with prestigious CVs. However, the book eschews jargon as its team of sociologists aim to “free powerful ideas from their academic trappings” and focus on practical ideas and intimate real-life stories. To this end, chapters effectively conclude with glossaries of “Key Concepts,” questions for discussion or reflection, and suggested readings. The editors even helpfully offer an alternative thematic division of the book’s chapters, which, combined with its impressive index, makes it an ideal primer and reference tool.
A well-researched and often poignant survey of the discipline of sociology.Pub Date: June 5, 2024
ISBN: 9780226833873
Page Count: 339
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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