A powerful and well-reasoned call to action.
A clear argument that “confronting the full danger of nuclear and climate devastation enables us to sustain rather than destroy our species.”
Renowned psychiatrist Lifton (Witness to an Extreme Century, 2011, etc.), a winner of the National Book Award, explains his use of the term “swerve” to describe “a significant, if not always logical or clear, shift in the way people experience their world.” In this instance, the shift reflects the recognition of the dangers posed by global warming. The author is best known for his study of how decent people come to accept an apocalyptic view of the future and even condone atrocities such as the bombing of Hiroshima. He compares the attempt to normalize the use of nuclear weapons to the current claim that climate change is a hoax. “Like global warming,” writes Lifton, “those weapons raised doubts about the future of our species.” Failing to accept the reality of global warming, Donald Trump and his corporate backers continue to encourage the reckless consumption of fossil fuels. The author points out that nuclear radiation is also an environmental issue even though the threats posed by nuclear weapons and global warming are significantly different. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused sudden “unprecedented slaughter and suffering,” while the effects of climate change are incremental. However, in both instances, acceptance of existing political power structures has led to widespread failure to act in a timely fashion. The similarity between them is in the quality of the responses they evoke; they both reflect a dangerous human tendency to “suppress and distort our perceptions of their danger” by “normalizing” them. Lifton argues forcefully for a significant swerve in popular understanding of the catastrophic potential of global warming, and he cites the 1982 million-person anti–nuclear weapons march in New York City as an example of the level of response needed regarding climate change today.
A powerful and well-reasoned call to action.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62097-347-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: July 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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