Eloquent contributions to the literature on a deeply contested issue.
A powerful collection of poems, fiction, and essays on the reality of abortion.
“Every abortion is a story,” writes Caitlin McDonnell in her moving essay, “The Abortion I Didn’t Want,” one of nearly 150 pieces by a diversity of women (and a few men) that address what Katha Pollitt calls the “bloody realism and emotional and social complexity” of ending a pregnancy. Finch (Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters, 2015, etc.) has drawn together writers across time (from the 16th century to the present), place, race, ethnicity, gender, age, and culture who offer stark, often wrenching revelations. She organizes the book into five sections: “Mind,” focusing on making the decision to abort; “Body,” on the physical experience; “Heart,” on the depth of emotions; “Will,” on the relationship of abortion to personal and political power; and “Spirit,” on the connection of abortion to a woman’s spiritual framework. For many contributors, the experience of abortion reverberated forever after. Writes Desiree Cooper, “we were pregnant with memory for the rest of our lives.” Among the more well-known contributors are Margaret Atwood, Ursula K. Le Guin, Amy Tan, Audre Lorde, Leslie Marmon Silko, Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Sexton, and Gloria Steinem, who admits feeling no regret about her decision. Having an abortion, she writes, “was the first time I had taken responsibility for my own life.” The empowerment she felt, however, was not shared by many others, who faced contempt, blame, and shame. Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez portrays the anguish and fear of teenage girls who live “in a country where abortion is illegal” and where they take place in “ghost houses, anonymous houses.” Novelist Soniah Kamal gathers stories from three Pakistani women who had abortions in 1990 in a country where premarital sex remains a crime punishable by five years in prison. Particularly heartbreaking pieces recount the decision to abort a severely malformed fetus—one, a baby with no brain, whose parents, wracked with grief, were forced to travel from Belfast, where abortion is a crime, to Liverpool.
Eloquent contributions to the literature on a deeply contested issue.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64259-148-4
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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