A disturbing yet thought-provoking tale of family strife and ethically unsound medical practice.
The shocking story of an heiress who was sterilized without her consent.
In 1936, Ann Cooper Hewitt, daughter of inventor Peter Cooper Hewitt and socialite Maryon Cooper Hewitt, sued her mother for $500,000. She alleged that Maryon conspired with Ann’s doctors to have her sterilized during a scheduled appendectomy in order to deprive Ann of her inheritance since Peter’s will stipulated that Ann’s share of his estate would revert back to her mother if Ann died childless. In this dramatic work of creative nonfiction, Farley focuses primarily on the lives of Maryon and Ann, exploring each of their abusive childhoods, subsequent relationships with men, and, particularly, how they were portrayed in the media. She also chronicles the trials of Maryon and her alleged accomplices and the estranged mother-daughter relationship at the heart of the story and weaves in bits of the history of eugenics. At the time of the trial, writes Farley, “many Americans didn’t know that tens of thousands of individuals had been sterilized in state institutions nationwide.” Due to the social status of the family, Americans from all walks of life followed the proceedings closely, stimulating conversations about medical ethics, especially the use of sterilization for population control and the ability of doctors to perform surgery “without written consent.” The author also sheds light on the number of sterilizations that have occurred more recently, either involuntarily or under false pretenses, in order to selectively control the population. She highlights both instances where federal funds have been used to sterilize low-income, Indigenous, incarcerated, and other marginalized women as well as related lawsuits and legislative amendments. Throughout, Farley maintains the focus on Ann and her family. While she does not provide a comprehensive discussion of eugenics, the eye-opening story of the family is a concrete example of lamentable policies that continue to shape the reproductive rights of women.
A disturbing yet thought-provoking tale of family strife and ethically unsound medical practice.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5335-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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