The cry of a wounded creature (“I have a heart easily hurt”) who cannot or will not let the wounds heal. They fuel her...
A controversial author (Scapegoat, 2000, etc.) offers her bitter and sad reflections on life as a feminist.
Dworkin lashes right out in her preface: “I have no sense of honor,” she writes, asserting that “triviality and deceit [are] the coin of the female realm.” What follows are vignettes from the life that led her to that view, most of them involving examples of adult deception and coercion. In short, dense chapters, Dworkin reviews her development into a radical feminist crusader against pornography and prostitution. By the sixth grade, she says, she was a rebel, refusing to sing “Silent Night” because it celebrated Christianity and she was Jewish; she characterizes the “pretty, gutless teacher” who tried to convince her to go along as “a female collaborator.” An encounter with a pedophile teacher taught her more about lying. Later, political activism led to jail and to self-imposed exile in Crete, where she taught herself to write. In Amsterdam, a battering husband drove her to prostitution; discovering the works of early second-wave feminists, she vowed to “give my life to the movement.” And she has, although not always in ways that the movement finds agreeable. When Dworkin began to speak about violence and rape, women of all sorts, including third-generation prostitutes, told her their stories of abuse. The issue of pornography collided with the issue of free speech, of course, but Dworkin believes class played a part as well. Maneuvered off the podium at a NOW convention, she comments, “it became a bad feminist habit for the rich to rat out the poor.” She also doesn’t hesitate to characterize President Clinton as an abuser and poet Allen Ginsberg as an avowed pedophile. The last chapter portrays women prostituted and abused as “paying the freight for all the rest.”
The cry of a wounded creature (“I have a heart easily hurt”) who cannot or will not let the wounds heal. They fuel her crusade.Pub Date: March 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-465-01753-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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