A thoughtful, deeply researched contribution to disability studies.
Tan, an associate professor of history at Holland, Michigan–based Hope College, explores the unique status of sightless people during Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1868).
The debut author, intrigued by features meant to aid people who are blind and living amid the infrastructure of modern Japanese cities, was inspired to research the status afforded to these citizens during the Tokugawa era. Centering the work on the concept that disability is a social and political identity as well as a physical impairment, Tan examines how blind people chose to accept or reject their disabled status based upon their financial circumstances: “Their disabled identities were often understood through public perceptions that linked physical disablement to the entitlement of aid.” In a lengthy introduction, Tan explains how the governing structure of the shogunate, organized into occupation-based status groups, afforded blind people their own group ruled by the Kyoto guild: a medieval lineage of blind musicians. Guild membership allowed men to train not only as musicians, but also as acupuncturists and masseurs, gaining patronage from the aristocracy as they ascended the guild’s hierarchical ranks. Tan also effectively uncovers how the fees required for guild membership and promotion, as well as the gender discrimination that barred women from membership, meant that some blind members of Tokugawa society faced significant barriers to self-sufficiency. The author presents all this in a straightforward structure, devoting each chapter to a different topic covering how blindness was perceived by Japanese ophthalmologists, the choices available to the visually impaired in Tokugawa society’s popular medical culture, and the options open to blind women and to men who chose not to join the guild. Along the way, Tan creatively uses resources such as medical histories, travel gazetteers, and the writings of people with visual impairment to ably supplement the general paucity of firsthand accounts regarding the topic, drawing important insights into how society shapes the self-perceptions of disabled people.
A thoughtful, deeply researched contribution to disability studies.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 9780472075485
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Univ. of Michigan
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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