Former Columbia University English professor Heilbrun (Hamlet's Mother and Other Women, 1990, etc.) turns her considerable writing and analytical skills to understanding an icon of the women's movement. Heilbrun begins with an introduction that acknowledges the inevitable biases of the biographer; the more a biographer claims to be neutral, she writes, the more suspect he or she becomes. That said, Heilbrun clearly states that she is a fan of her subject (who cooperated with the project), whom she sees as ``the epitome of female beauty and the quintessence of female revolution.'' Balance can be provided by others, she writesand in Steinem's case, many have been more than happy to fill her detractors' shoes. Heilbrun eventually discusses the hostility and derision Steinem has drawn from all sides of the political and social worldthe fear she's inspired in conservative men, the jealousy in less attractive and intelligent womenbut she begins with Steinem's family: Her early feminist paternal grandmother; her obese, peripatetic, irresponsible, and charming father; her well-meaning but frankly insane motherall these and more contributed to the making of the complex adult Steinem. From her unconventional and impoverished youth in Toledo, Ohio, Steinem went on to the privileged world of Smith College and then to India, where she firmed up her understanding of the need for social and racial equality. Her realization that women were underprivileged in a unique and insidious way would not come until many years, causes, and men later, in the late '60s; but when she did discover it, she would adopt it with her characteristic wholeheartedness. Steinem's feminism, like her well-known project Ms. magazine, was criticized for being too glossy and bourgeois by some, too radical by others. But while Heilbrun admits Steinem's numerous errors in judgment, she argues convincingly that what is never in doubt is Steinem's sincerity. Unapologetically one-sidedand nobody could ask for a more eloquent, lucid, or intelligent advocate.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-31371-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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