Sometimes cranky but consistently engaging takes on cultural corrosion and collapse.
Sharp commentaries on the arts and academia and the forces the author believes threaten them.
This selection of essays by veteran critic Deresiewicz, which followsThe Death of the Artist, reveals an open-mindedness when it comes to subject matter. The author writes enthusiastically about fiction, dance, TV, and more. He admires heterodox intellectuals like Harold Rosenberg and polymaths like Clive James. But he also writes with a conservative cantankerousness about what he sees as higher education’s descent into groupthink and younger generations’ rush to embrace it. In multiple essays, he decries colleges’ dismantling of the humanities in favor of STEM departments more obviously capable of minting interchangeable employees, and he calls out the dogmatic thinking that consumes elite institutions. He gripes about political correctness, partly in exasperation with its knee-jerk tendencies (“If you are a white man, you are routinely regarded as guilty until proven innocent”), but he’s also upset at its broader cynicism, the way it’s a “fig leaf for the competitive individualism of meritocratic neoliberalism, with its worship of success above all.” When Deresiewicz, the winner of a National Book Critics Circle award for excellence in reviewing, has a juicy target, it can be surprisingly good fun: His assault on Harold Bloom’s late-era woolliness is a classic takedown, and his jeremiad about the folly of elevating food to an art form is debatable in the right way: a provocation with enough facts behind it to be worth discussing. A stronger sense of humor might help some of his assertions go down easier, and he’s capable of it, as in a wry piece about Bernard Malamud, a fellow fish-out-of-water Jew in Oregon. Deresiewicz’s soberness speaks to the intensity of his concern: The humanities are under threat by legislators, technology, and its own practitioners, and he’s a passionate advocate for their dignity.
Sometimes cranky but consistently engaging takes on cultural corrosion and collapse.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-85864-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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