Though repetitive or clichéd in places, this collection’s standouts far outweigh its missteps.
Nelson and Batey curate superior snippets of women’s creative nonfiction.
In this follow-up to Nothing But the Truth So Help Me God: 51 Women Reveal the Power of Positive Female Connection (2012), members of the online community A Band of Women share anecdotes of dealing with life’s inevitable transitions. Divided into six overlapping sections, these three- to five-page essays range in topic from the harrowing (divorce and alcoholism) to the uplifting (learning to swim at 40; expecting twins after infertility treatment). In the collection’s opener, “Love You Hard,” one of the strongest and most affecting pieces, Abby Maslin talks about her husband’s traumatic brain injury: “Life Part II is all about relearning the basics,” she writes. Heather Kristin’s tale of finding her father homeless on the streets of New York City recalls Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle (2005), while Kelly Corrigan and Christine Beirne offer accounts of approaching breast cancer with grace and humor. Some authors mistakenly attempt to cover too much ground—fitting a whole life’s misadventures into a few pages—whereas the most successful zoom in on a specific moment but still draw larger lessons. For example, Vanessa Hua reconnects with her Chinese heritage when she cares for her Parkinson’s-afflicted father, and a semester spent in Israel teaches Abby Ellin that “there are no geographical cures.” Likewise, an ordinary shopping trip reminds Leslie Lagerstrom of the complications of raising a transgender child, and 9/11 widow Christie Coombs plunges back into grief when she receives a call identifying her husband’s elbow. More ruthless editing could eliminate redundant or corny material (one too many empty nest meditations, plus some Chicken Soup for the Soul–style sentimentality), but on the whole, this is a wonderful introduction to contemporary autobiographical writing. Minibios reveal that many of these essays are from memoirs in progress or by writers with blogs or magazine columns. Every reader will discover experiences that resonate and new authors to love.
Though repetitive or clichéd in places, this collection’s standouts far outweigh its missteps.Pub Date: May 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988375468
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Nothing But The Truth Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
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
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