A fairly good survey of the first 4,000 years of Judaism and the role patriarchy has played in it—also a thinly veiled harangue against everything that raises the author's ire about modern Jewish life. From glass ceilings to boring charity dinners, Cantor gripes about subjects Jewish and not exclusively Jewish in a history that seems designed to showcase her grievances. She makes only occasional references to patriarchy's nefarious influence, focusing instead on American Jewish materialism, the lack of funding for Jewish education and culture, and antifeminism within Judaism's social hierarchy. But while her conclusions are too broad to fit the confines of her discussion of patriarchy's legacy, they are probably too narrow to hold the interest of anyone other than middle- aged, left-wing, Jewish feminists. For them, Cantor's book will provide more evidence of what they already believe: that American Judaism is ``spiritually/culturally anemic'' and that assimilationism is the primary culprit. The solution? ``The realization [by Jewish feminists] that if there is to be a Jewish future, it will have to be a feminist future.'' Cantor makes some insightful points about key players within Jewish family life—the no-win situation of the Jewish mother and what goes into the creation of the Jewish-American son, for example—but in her effort to explore stereotypes about Jews, she instead appears to accept and even reinforce them, making unfair generalizations about, among others, charitable American Jews and Jewish organizations. The author gets away with a lot by conveying the excitement she feels for her subject and through her engaging style, although she has some annoying literary tics, as when she offers two, or even three, word choices/options separated by slashes—an affectation that occasionally proves useful but more often seems merely indecisive. A vast and often entertaining look into one woman's Jewish-feminist midlife crisis.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-061376-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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