The desperate quest to conceive, by a middle-aged, fadingly fertile woman who had nurtured her freelance writing career until the brink of too late. At 35 Fleming suddenly realized that she did want a baby after all. She ditched her diaphragm and tried to conceive with her nearly 60-year-old husband in the privacy of their bedroom. When that failed, the game moved to high-tech hospital wards. Time, money, and the odds of becoming pregnant slipped away as Fleming tried a barrage of procedures: GIFT, ZIFT, FET and other sterile acronyms. Between hormone shots and bumpy rides in the stirrups, Fleming bitterly remembers why she waited so long to have children- -the women's movement. And so begins her course in Feminism 101. The 50s: Sitcom-perfect marriage is a myth; her own parents divorce. The 60s: Fleming turns from budding high-schooler to sassy coed brandishing birth control pills. The 70s: She discovers kindred spirits de Beauvoir, Friedan, Greer, and husband; begins journalism career. The 80s: Reagan and Robert Bly rule. The 90s: Baby boomers reclaim America and get serious about raising families. This 40-year recap is interesting if you missed it the first time, but also highly subjective. Fleming reaches for answers using slipshod reasoning, drawing conclusions she presents as universal. But she is not the Everyfeminist she thinks she is; her theories are marked by the biases of a wrenching personal struggle. Read this more for the personal details of Fleming's quest to conceive than for the larger picture; then you'll see the power and poetry of her writing. Her question is ``How did feminism steer me wrong?'' The reader's is ``Will she get pregnant? How? What if she doesn't?'' We care about Fleming's well-being, not Gloria Steinem's bad advice. Manipulative yet effectively moving and very personal—a diary written with the benefit of hindsight. (First serial to the New York Times Magazine)
Pub Date: June 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13740-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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