A pointed, dense exposé á la George Orwell.
A veteran British journalist tracks the disintegration of public discourse along the trajectory of his long career covering politics in England and the United States.
The proliferation of Donald Trump’s crassness of speech, ad hominem attacks, and outright lies is hardly surprising, since they stem from the introduction of the vernacular and the technological into public rhetoric. While there was never any “golden age” of public language, writes longtime journalist, producer, and current New York Times Company president and CEO Thompson, there have been in recent decades “specific accelerants that make our circumstance exceptional. These include the revolution in media and communications that the author witnessed firsthand from his first job as a research assistant trainee at BBC Television just as Margaret Thatcher swept into power as prime minister in 1979. Using classical rhetorical terms as touchstones, Thompson notes that Thatcher’s radicalism extended into her language as well; it was “hard-edged, insistent, utterly sure of itself.” Eventually, she could not convince the voters of her essential ethos and became the rather unfeeling “thing her enemies said she was.” By the time of Ronald Reagan’s election, Thompson asserts, the traditional vocabulary of “grandiloquence,” used so famously by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, had given way to distilled, ideological one-liners that were perfect for TV news but carried little serious policy content. Hiring cutting-edge, cynical marketing teams to spin their messages, these conservative leaders honed “the stylized hyperbole of reality TV, the knowing comic beats of the late-night talk shows.” Thompson examines how Tony Blair and his tabloid political editor Alastair Campbell adopted a fierce “combination of professionalism and paranoia” and, along with Silvio Berlusconi and Vladimir Putin, a kind of stringent, populist, adversarial tone the author calls masochistic. The author also thankfully takes on those leaders who promote war and unscience—the outright denial of scientific experts on climate change—as egregious examples of eroding the public trust in language.
A pointed, dense exposé á la George Orwell.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-05957-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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