A sharp indictment of male privilege and an urgent appeal for a more inclusive practice of science.
An insider’s portrayal of the many reasons why women are underrepresented in science.
Early in the book, Donald, emeritus professor of experimental physics and former Gender Equality Champion at the University of Cambridge, poses a wonderfully pointed question: “Can you think of a female scientist?” Many people can name only one: Marie Curie. This collective ignorance illustrates the numerous factors that discourage girls from pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Biosciences aside, women are “typically well below 50%” in the STEM disciplines. Even when they earn doctorates, they are less likely than men to continue or rise to senior positions in labs or at universities. “It isn’t ability that’s stopping them,” dampening their aspirations, and wasting their talents. Donald acknowledges some progress while noting the persistence of cultural attitudes that assume math is too difficult for girls, exclude stories of accomplished women scientists in textbooks and the mass media, and deny girls the toys that encourage scientific curiosity. In their careers, women encounter workplace harassment and find their ideas coopted by men. Support for having a family while staying sufficiently engaged in the field, moreover, is still inadequate. As the author points out, “domesticity remains widely seen as the woman’s preserve more than the man’s.” Donald dreams of a field that offers “opportunity for everybody to make career choices that are best for them, not what other people’s expectations force upon them.” Providing affordable child care, ensuring that women (and other minorities) are represented on hiring committees, and making career ladders more manageable will benefit women and enable a much-needed diversity of perspectives. Being a scientist also involves personal traits such as curiosity, confidence, and persistence. However, these traits are often defeated by institutional biases that thwart even the most dedicated girls and women.
A sharp indictment of male privilege and an urgent appeal for a more inclusive practice of science.Pub Date: May 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780192893406
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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