Though Luscombe doesn’t break much new ground in the genre, she provides informative, helpful advice on how to maintain a...
Six areas that need special attention if a marriage is to last a lifetime.
In her debut book, Time editor at large Luscombe has identified six different subjects she feels couples must master: “familiarity, fighting, finances, family, fooling around, and finding help.” Taking each topic in turn, the author interweaves stories of her own relationship with her husband with research and tales from other couples. This provides readers with an in-depth analysis of what works and doesn’t work in each scenario. Luscombe also sprinkles in some droll humor, which helps break up the seriousness inherent in the topic. As the author demonstrates, familiarity and fighting appear to go hand in hand. Often, we get so used to our partner that we forget what made us attracted to them in the first place. Eventually, we create a negative image and stick with it. Money is an issue regardless of whether both partners work or one works and the other stays home with the children. Luscombe notes that it’s important to address wage discrepancies and the fact that more women feel less dependent on a spouse when they earn their own income. To prevent infidelity, couples need to talk about sex, make time for it, and understand that men and women usually have different levels of desire. For those couples who need it, Luscombe recommends couples therapy; having an unbiased outsider look at a relationship’s pressure points can help move partners back onto a better path together. “People who are happily paired with another live longer and are healthier, richer, and more satisfied with their life, in the main, than people who are singles or whose relationships don’t last,” writes the author. “Their kids are more likely to thrive. They have more sex.” Using her suggestions, many couples will be able to weather the ebb and flow of their relationship and stick with it.
Though Luscombe doesn’t break much new ground in the genre, she provides informative, helpful advice on how to maintain a marriage for the long haul.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-59236-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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