Useful reading for book critics and journalists who cover books, but the audience likely ends there.
A clinical exploration of how books get reviewed, what the consequences are, and whether any of it means anything at all.
In her first book, Chong (Sociology/McMaster Univ.) turns her critical eye to the art of book reviews and the conceptual insights that go into each review. “Book reviews matter,” writes the author at the beginning. “Getting a review in a high-status publication…regardless of whether the review is positive or negative increases the odds that a writer will go on to publish future books.” Some readers (and critics) will question the breadth of her study—the New York Times and the Atlantic are wonderful platforms, but most book reviewers won’t see their names in those pages—but Chong works diligently through the review process, starting with a consideration of “aesthetic quality” before moving on to the idea that while “reviewing is utterly subjective…this is not to say that reviewing is utterly unreasoned or idiosyncratic.” The center of the narrative focuses on consequences—believe it or not, even negative reviews can help sell books—and the author also takes into consideration the symbiotic nature of bylined reviews. Many critics are also authors, of course, and Chong notes the tendency of “playing nice” among writers reviewing under their own names. (Anyone reading this review knows that Kirkus reviews are anonymous.) The most intriguing question comes in Chapter 7: “Do We Need Book Reviews?” Whether it’s the threat posed by “amateur reviewers” on Amazon, Goodreads, or other online platforms or the existential threat that keeps reviewers up at night, “irrelevance,” these are questions worth pondering. However, noncritics and other lay readers aren’t likely to find much value in this speculative dissection of a complicated and evolving trade, “a highly uncertain endeavor.”
Useful reading for book critics and journalists who cover books, but the audience likely ends there.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-691-16746-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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