A sobering look at the power of the media to transform the perception of a people, and a reminder that the truth is seldom...
A revisionist look at the Tasaday people, “discovered” during the 1970s in a remote region of the Philippines and declared Stone Age survivors, but later dismissed as a hoax.
When government minister Manuel Elizade first heard of them in 1971, the Tasaday were a group of about 24 people living in Southern Mindanao’s caves and using stone tools. From approximately 1971 to 1982, Elizade permitted visits to the Tasaday by anthropologists and journalists, chief among them John Nance, whose book The Gentle Tasaday publicized this supposed “lost tribe” to Western readers. But after Elizade, a supporter of Ferdinand Marcos, closed the Tasaday reserve to outsiders and fled the country in 1983, rumors began to surface that the tribe had been hired by Elizade and Marcos to play a role, perhaps because the politicians wanted control of the timber on Tasaday land, or the great mineral wealth supposedly located within the tribal preserve. Allegations that Nance was linked to the hoax ruined his journalistic career. When Hemley (English/Univ. of Utah; Nora, 1998, etc.) arrived in Manila in 1999, he was fairly convinced that the Tasaday did not exist. After consulting with anthropologists and journalists who studied the tribe in the 1970s and eventually meeting some of the original members, however, he concluded that many of the original story’s discrepancies appeared to be the results of an overeager media, not of a sort of Piltdown fakery. Yes, the Tasaday had lived in caves in the rainforest and used stone tools; they became a media construct, a news story sought by an obsessed public, through no fault of their own. They remain impoverished today, but their numbers have increased due to intermarriage with a nearby tribe. Since Elizade’s death in 1997, the only member of the outside world they trust completely is John Nance, who has remained in contact.
A sobering look at the power of the media to transform the perception of a people, and a reminder that the truth is seldom simple. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-17716-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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