by Sandra M. Gilbert ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 2, 2011
Spanning four decades, ranging from groundbreaking excavations to magisterial syntheses, this stimulating volume reminds us...
Uneven but rewarding collection of essays by poet and pioneering feminist scholar Gilbert (Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, 2006, etc.).
“To reread is both to read again and to read anew,” writes the author in a preface to a volume that does indeed contain some rethinking, including more nuanced assessments of female writers’ ambivalence toward powerful women than were possible in the giddy early days of the Second Wave. The first section displays both the strengths and weaknesses of academic feminism. The charming “Becoming a Feminist Together—and Apart” chronicles Gilbert’s personal trials as a female graduate student turned down for jobs because she was “just a Berkeley housewife.” Readers will share her exhilaration as she discovers her métier and her convictions, team-teaching with Susan Gubar a course on female-authored texts that became The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), one of the founding works of modern feminism. By contrast, “What Do Feminist Critics Want?, Or a Postcard from the Volcano” is a tedious tract on scholarly politics of little interest to anyone outside the academy. The subsequent two sections, which feature close readings of authors from Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Brontë to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, are more engaging, though still best appreciated by those with a strong background in English-language literature. “Potent Griselda” reminds us that male writers, especially from the late 19th century on, have often acknowledged and sometimes even admired the power of the ancient Great Mother goddess, while “Mother Rites” is an ambitious attempt to analyze the strategies employed by female artists to tap the matriarch’s mythic powers without having their creativity simplistically tied to motherhood and biology. Gilbert occasionally lapses into academic jargon, but in her best pieces she is forthright without abdicating her mission as a scholar: to read beneath the surface of familiar works and show us what they say about our culture and our attitudes.
Spanning four decades, ranging from groundbreaking excavations to magisterial syntheses, this stimulating volume reminds us how much feminism has changed and grown since the 1970s.Pub Date: May 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-393-06764-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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