Even if Crawford is fighting a losing battle, he fights it valiantly, even heroically.
A philosopher stakes his claim to freedom and the open road.
What do driving cars and riding motorcycles have to do with philosophy? Quite a bit, it seems, at least when Crawford is steering the discussion. As in his previous books, Shop Class as Soulcraft and The World Beyond Your Head, the author brings an easy and wide-ranging erudition to his subject—in this case, our relationships to our vehicles. The book might have been titled In Defense of Driving. Despite his mostly sober prose, Crawford’s “critical, humanistic inquiry” is ultimately a passionate appeal to the importance of the autonomous individual in the face of the dehumanizing pressure of automation. Driverless cars meet a worthy opponent in Crawford, who elegantly dissuades us from a future in which “the world becomes a techno-zoo for defeated people, like the glassy-eyed creatures in WALL-E, or like the lab rats who are raised in Plexiglas enclosures.” No matter how many lives you think could be saved by removing imperfect humans from the driving equation or how tempting you find it to turn your commute into more time looking at your phone, this book will have you pining for the freedom the open road has always represented. Crawford can get carried away, as in a too-detailed account (with diagrams) of rebuilding a Volkswagen engine, but his delight in his subject makes for an enjoyable reading experience even for the non-enthusiast. The text is yet more evidence for Crawford’s argument, now extending over three books, that paying attention to and placing ourselves in the material world brings a certain satisfaction that we neglect at our peril. Employing memoir, journalism, cultural criticism, and political philosophy—and never shying away from the contentious (“An Ode to Redneck Women”)—the author makes being human seem worthwhile.
Even if Crawford is fighting a losing battle, he fights it valiantly, even heroically.Pub Date: June 9, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-274196-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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 timely, spirited collection.
A compendium of feminist perspectives.
Essayist, memoirist, and fiction writer Gay represents the history, scope, and challenges of feminism in a judicious selection of 65 pieces, some written by iconic feminist writers (bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Susan B. Anthony), others by collectives, and still others by lesser-known voices. Citing “dynamism” as her guiding principle, Gay has chosen works that are articulate, diverse, and hard-hitting. “I believe there is a feminist canon,” Gay writes, “one that is subjective and always evolving, but also representative of a long, rich tradition of feminist scholarship.” The pieces are grouped into eight thematic sections. Foundational texts include a statement of guiding principles for the 2017 Women’s March; early feminist texts begin with 16th-century scholar Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s defense of women’s superiority and includes Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Anthony’s argument for women’s right to vote. Other well-known pieces include Judy Brady’s wry “I Want a Wife,” a 1970 essay reprinted in the first issue of Ms. magazine; Rebecca Solnit’s “Men Explain Things to Me”; and Gloria Steinem’s “If Men Could Menstruate.” There are also fresh surprises: “The Woman-Identified Woman,” a manifesto written by six women calling themselves Radicalesbians, argues that lesbianism is central to feminist politics “as an identity of political, cultural, and erotic resistance to patriarchy.” In “Girl,” novelist Alexander Chee reflects on gender fluidity, remembering being mistaken for a girl when he was growing up and revealing the beauty he finds when he puts on drag. With its capacious perspective, the collection speaks to a range of feminist concerns, past, present, and future. As Gay notes, “women’s bodies, movements, and choices are contingent on the whims of men in power. We have made progress but we are not yet free.”
A timely, spirited collection.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780143110392
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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