Smart and tough: an author with one eye out for the underdog, the other on the sickness of the political and corporate...
From Davis (Magical Urbanism, 2000, etc.), rangy, astute, switchblade-wicked essays ranging from depictions of Los Angeles in film noir to a discussion of a Paiute prophet’s neo-catastrophic epistemology.
September 11 may have marked the end of American exceptionalism, but anxiety was already upon us, writes Davis, and “it is already clear that the advent of ‘catastrophic terrorism’ in tandem with protracted recession will produce major mutations in the American city.” Fear and catastrophe run through this assembly of essays, as seen in the portraits of hell from national and international ecocide sites including Las Vegas, whose apocalyptic urbanism is cooed over by postmodernist philosophers as “virtuality,” and the pharaonic and socially irresponsible redevelopment strategy of downtown LA. As if he were a pair of zoom binoculars, Davis can look hyper-closely at the tortured Compton, a neighborhood about to slip its own tectonic disk, or pull far back into comparative planetology and “an existential Earth shaped by the creative energies of its catastrophes.” Pushy and polymathic, Davis has earned the right call LA’s subway “an aphrodisiac to attract real estate investment to the city’s three largest redevelopment projects,” or to say that the South Central riot “was as much about empty bellies and broken hearts as it was about police batons,” because he has made the connections, a web of such intricacy—racism, vested interests, ecology, social neglect, corruption, real-estate scams, pork-barrel politics, urban dereliction—that it deserves a Tiffany setting. There are moments when readers will wish Davis would cut to the chase, when the writing feels too much like action painting swooning in its own gestures; though there are more moments of salutary humor, as when cold warriors in San Diego managed to find “Kremlin-endorsed hot-rodders and Maoist high school sex clubs” under every grain of beach sand.
Smart and tough: an author with one eye out for the underdog, the other on the sickness of the political and corporate landscape.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2002
ISBN: 1-56584-765-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
IN THE NEWS
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
