Solid reportage and inspirational reading for those who imagine they can do it—whatever “it” is—better.
Profiles in courage—at least the courage to challenge conventional wisdom and innovate successfully in a world of business and institutions that don’t necessarily welcome change.
In his latest foray into the world of invention and life-hacking, business journalist and trend-spotter Stevenson (An Optimist’s Tour of the Future, 2011) lauds “the pioneers, architects, and builders of a surprising and hopeful future,” most of whom have done their work by bucking received opinion and admonitions that something can’t or shouldn’t be done. One such pioneer, motivated by a desperately ill brother, pulled together the largest research lab for Lou Gehrig’s disease in the world only to discover that that research was far behind where it was supposed to be, so he became a “guerrilla scientist” devoted to challenging the status quo on drug discovery; his newfound resistance led to work in other maladies, such as Parkinson’s disease. Finding new medicines is damnably difficult work, all the more reason for difficult evangelists, hard to please and hard to argue with, to come to the fore. One Indian pioneer whom Stevenson profiles adapted network theory to the way in which hot lunches are distributed throughout the teeming city of Mumbai; the delivery people averred, “we don’t know management theories. All we have is decades of learning.” That learning is key: all of Stevenson’s case studies are wedded to the idea of constant learning, experimentation, and questioning, whether hacking government—a “stratospheric failure of modern democracies,” the author writes, is their “inability to provide a financial system that serves the majority”—or revolutionizing educational systems so that schools actually teach. Stevenson offers no overt formulas, but his case studies are suggestive of the ways in which a willful innovator can ignore obstacles and do whatever needs to be done, allowing for failure just as much as for success.
Solid reportage and inspirational reading for those who imagine they can do it—whatever “it” is—better.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1583-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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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