A fine work of history, showing how we came to live in a world of things, fat if not necessarily happy.
Pop quiz: Patriotism involves (a) giving your life for your country; (b) flying the flag on national holidays; (c) shopping till you drop. If you answered (c), you’ll be well prepared to follow this intriguing, oblique look at the recent American past by Bancroft Prize–winner Cohen (Making a New Deal, 1990).
Mass consumption, whether of canned soup, laundry detergent, or cookie-cutter houses, already had a long pedigree by WWII, the author writes; the 1920s in particular saw a huge growth in mass-market advertising and national brand-building. But the war and its immediate aftermath gave American consumers an ideology to justify their acquisitive habits, argues Cohen (History/Harvard): Americans of the time “saw their nation as the model for the world of a society committed to mass and what were assumed to be its far-reaching benefits.” In this democracy of the checkbook, spending was perceived as a duty, and the Consumers’ Republic became even more ideologically charged during the Cold War, when propagandists contrasted the overflowing aisles of American supermarkets with the bread lines and empty shelves of the Soviet bloc. Cohen links such postwar policies as the GI Bill and the restructuring of collective-bargaining procedures to this national marketplace; elsewhere she couples African-Americans’ dawning awareness of their purchasing power with the rise of the civil-rights movement. She examines the growth of suburbs and other features of “the landscape of mass consumption,” together with the social tensions resulting from changes in gender, class, and economic dynamics as everyone increasingly ate the same burgers and bought the same soap. Cohen’s arguments are dense, her tone academic, but the narrative is always accessible and enlivened by telling asides: “Department store profits reached a new peak during 1941,” she notes, “with the bombing of Pearl Harbor casting only a small shadow over Christmas gift-buying that December.”
A fine work of history, showing how we came to live in a world of things, fat if not necessarily happy.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-40750-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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