An impassioned argument heavier on critique than solutions.
The future of democracy depends on engaged, media-literate citizens.
Media critics Higdon (History and Media Studies/California State Univ., East Bay, and Univ. of San Francisco), a co-founding member of the Global Critical Media Literacy Project, and Huff (Social Science and History/Diablo Valley Coll.; co-editor: Censored 2019: The Top Censored Stories and Media Analysis of 2017-2018, 2019, etc.), executive producer and co-host of the weekly radio show Project Censored, paint a dismal picture of contemporary journalism, arguing persuasively that the media has been co-opted by commercial interests and no longer serve to inform the public about issues crucial to democracy. “The business-dominant economy” that has emerged since the Reagan years, the authors assert, has created “a veritable one-party system—the pro-corporate party—with two factions, the Republicans and the Democrats, funded to uphold corporate interests above all others.” Because commercial media exist “to attract, harvest, and sell people’s consciousness to advertisers,” they have seen Donald Trump as a sure way to boost ratings. The authors devote more than half of the book to reprising Trump’s familiar, much-publicized lies and excoriating the media for giving him out-of-proportion coverage. Rather than conducting responsible investigation, disseminating information, and analyzing political issues, the media inflame polarization, “fostering a militant ‘us versus them’ mentality in regard to competing candidates, issues, and ideas.” A critically savvy public would be able to see through these strategies, but, the authors insist, “information literacy and media education are practically non-existent,” leaving Americans vulnerable to “the torrent of images and messages vying for their attention.” Education reform and a revitalized press are needed for a “free, self-governing society to thrive.” To that end, the authors call for “critical media literacy education” that emphasizes civics, critical thinking skills, critical awareness of media, community engagement, and cultural competency (including the cultivation of empathy) as well as a broadening and deepening of news reporting. Advocating new teacher-training programs and extensive curriculum changes, the authors offer few details about how these reforms can be developed and instituted.
An impassioned argument heavier on critique than solutions.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-87286-767-3
Page Count: 238
Publisher: City Lights
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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
PERSPECTIVES
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