A perceptive, occasionally slow-reading mix of history, personal narrative, and cultural criticism tries with great (though not complete) success to analyze the role race and money play in America’s most intractable social problems. Researching the history of his adopted northeast Florida home, Rymer (Genie: An Abused Child’s Flight from Silence, 1993) encounters suspicion as a white journalist interested in black history. His interest is largely explained by the fact that he sees the rise and fall of American Beach, one of the country’s few black resorts, as exemplary of the problems faced by American society as a whole. The longest of the three overlapping stories, “Ancestral Houses,” examines the life of A.L. Lewis, Florida’s first black millionaire and a towering example of a type long disappeared from the American scene: a businessman who melds morality and commerce. As the founder of the Afro-American Life Insurance Company and the architect of the planned community of American Beach, Lewis was the moral and financial pillar of his community. After his death, both company and community disintegrated. Rymer—who sees this sad tale as an example of the tragic arc of US (rather than exclusively black) history—brackets that story with two related narratives. The first details the death of a troubled black man at the hands of white policemen, and the tensions it causes. The second contrasts Disney World’s nostalgic Celebration community with the real-world battle for autonomy waged by Eatonville, the nearby hometown of Zora Neale Hurston. Throughout, Rymer’s conviction is that American society has been rent by a central problem throughout history: our ability to “dichotomize” our lives between business and morality. He’s at his best as a reporter, allowing his subjects to spin their own tales. At times his social commentary (his comparison of Disney’s utopian Celebration community with the ideals of the Harlem Renaissance, for example) overreaches. Despite flaws, a provocative, smart, and often withering look at American culture.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017483-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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
PERSPECTIVES
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