A welcome reconsideration of an underappreciated early-20th-century journalist and activist.
An overdue biography of an influential suffragist, pacifist, and civil libertarian.
“God meant the whole rich world of work and play and adventure for women as well as men,” Crystal Eastman (1881-1928) said in a 1914 speech. “It is high time for us to enter into our heritage—that is my feminist faith.” The daughter of two ministers, Eastman was especially close to her mother, who served with Thomas Beecher, the half brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and the abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, at a church in upstate New York. After earning a law degree from New York University, she pursued progressive causes, including workers’ rights, suffrage, socialism, reproductive rights, and civil liberties. In the first biography of Eastman, Aronson (Journalism and Media Studies/Fordham Univ.; Taking Liberties: Early American Women’s Magazines and Their Readers, 2002, etc.) casts her subject as a journalist and intersectional activist who advocated for social justice while embarking on love affairs, two unconventional marriages, and motherhood. Despite lifelong health problems, Eastman investigated hazardous labor conditions for the Russell Sage Foundation and wrote a landmark 1910 report on that effort, Work Accidents and the Law, which led to the country’s first workers’ compensation law. She later became a prominent suffragist and co-founder of forerunners of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, often working beside trailblazers such as Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman or with her brother, Max, with whom she co-edited the leftist monthly the Liberator. This dense and deeply researched biography features some distracting modern clichés (Eastman “noted that her biological clock had been actively ticking” and found herself “juggling work and family”), but Aronson leaves no doubt that Eastman was an inspiring figure who deserves the renewed attention that the book should bring.
A welcome reconsideration of an underappreciated early-20th-century journalist and activist.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-19-994873-4
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
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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