A challenging and provocative inquiry into how we see the world…now, “the point is to change it.”
A semiotics for the masses.
Mirzoeff (Media, Culture, and Communications/New York Univ.; The Right to Look, 2011, etc.) has been instrumental in establishing the field of visual culture studies. His latest book is a “toolkit” for thinking about it; he wants to help people try to make sense of images they see. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical writings nicely distilled for general readers, especially John Berger’s Ways of Seeing as well as those of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, Mirzoeff fashions a lucid and accessible introduction to how images shape our lives and effect change, political and social. He cites some staggering statistics: in 2011, there were some 3 trillion photographs in existence and in 2014, 1 trillion were added, mostly digital. Six billion hours of YouTube videos are watched every month. The author starts with the selfie, a form of self-portraiture once only available to the wealthy. It has created a “new global majority’s conversation with itself.” Then it’s the role of the brain in how we see images. Next, he takes on the role of images in wars and has some thought-provoking things to say about drones, which epitomize the “new moment in global visual culture.” Mirzoeff then moves on to the development of filmic screen images and railways as two material networks that produced different ways to see the world. He finishes with discussions of today’s mega-cities, climate change, and a world of political unrest and uprisings. Even though it sometimes feels like a textbook, the book offers numerous insights into ‘reading’ the significance of images in the world today and is filled with intriguing, insightful nuggets—e.g., the relationship between impressionism and the 19th century’s industrial fog or the role of street art in political protests.
A challenging and provocative inquiry into how we see the world…now, “the point is to change it.”Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-465-09600-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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