A personal and passionate story about making a world “that is nourished, healed, and flourishing.”
The actor and director candidly discusses her turbulent personal evolution within a changing American society.
For Tamblyn (Any Man, 2018, etc.), America’s current “existential crisis and…questioning of its own values and future” is a manifestation of a new social awareness, especially where gender inequities are concerned. Drawing from her experiences in an industry infamous for its racism, sexism, and misogyny, the author traces the “ignition” of her own feminist consciousness. In 2008, the then-25-year-old author dreamed of creating a film version of the Janet Fitch novel Paint It Black. But in an industry that routinely snubbed the efforts of female directors, Tamblyn did not know how she could transform her dream into reality. The same year, she campaigned for presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, whose efforts symbolized the ongoing female battle to break through the glass ceilings of power. In the difficult, rejection-filled years that followed, Tamblyn forged ahead with the attitude that if the mostly male creative decision-makers in Hollywood would not allow her to get a foot in the door, then she would “build my own goddamn house.” The author eventually succeeded in making a generally well-reviewed film and distributing it through a small woman-owned company. Just as Tamblyn began to feel empowered for her achievements, she witnessed Clinton’s second defeat, this time to a man who exemplified the toxic masculinity she spent so many years fighting against. In the aftermath, Tamblyn, now a mother to an infant daughter, became keenly aware of the impact misogyny had on the female body and mind, including her own, which suffered from lingering postpartum inflammation. She questioned her own privilege as a white female, embraced intersectional feminism, and co-founded Time’s Up, a movement dedicated to helping women “be heard and acknowledged in male-dominated workplaces.” Though prone to digression and occasional political overzealousness, the book offers illuminating insights into the changing face of feminism and the continued struggle to overcome the hardening lines of gender injustice.
A personal and passionate story about making a world “that is nourished, healed, and flourishing.”Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984822-98-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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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