A study so painful in its case histories and reported numbers of women abused by men that most readers will flinch as they absorb it; by the author of Women Who Kill (1980). But that is Jones's purpose: to rouse men and women— especially legislators, judges, police, and social workers who fail to protect women—to awareness. Among the numbers: from 1967 to 1973, 17,500 women and children were killed in the US by ``battering men,'' slightly less than half the number of men killed in Vietnam during the same period. Two decades later, police receive reports of more than 21,000 ``domestic assaults'' (including rape and murder) every week. Women's legal struggle to secure a life free of violence dates back to English common law and to 19th-century American statutes that permitted husbands to ``chastise'' their wives without danger of prosecution. Although subsequent laws protect women and children against abuse, the right of a man to control ``his'' woman lurks in the public consciousness—leading to cops reluctant to interfere in ``domestic disputes''; judges wary of imprisoning men convicted of wife-beating; and a general tendency to blame the victim—even when, Jones says, she's made every effort to escape her oppressor. The author cites instances of women assaulted and killed while living under so-called orders of protection, and of women attacked where they should be safest: in the courthouse (lawyers and judges number among the victims). What can be done? Jones suggests changing the focus of inquiry from the women who are battered to the men who attack, and questioning the ``hydraulic'' theory of human behavior—that violence wells up in men and must be released. She offers guidelines for change—including the passage of the ERA- -that would affect how we view women both as societal members and as human beings. A powerful, frightening report that drives home the fact that doing violence to another is tolerated in this society—especially if the victim is a female sex partner.
Pub Date: Jan. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-8070-6770-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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