On the personal side, a best-case scenario; on the political side, a brilliant thinker sets the adrenaline flowing all over...
Betty Friedan tells her side of the story, in an autobiography so amiable that friends and enemies alike will wonder what happened to the confrontational woman who was the intellectual tsunami in the second-wave struggle for women’s rights.
Friedan (The Fountain of Age, 1993) sticks with the basic outline of earlier (unauthorized) profiles. Growing up “different” in Peoria, Illinois, Friedan felt out of step. Mainstream society (or her vision of it) shaped her thinking: change comes from the middle class, as she said later. Smith College disciplined her mind but did little to relieve the social pressures (in support of marriage and childrearing) that she felt she could not measure up to. Reflections on her children (“I never had problems with my kids”), her marriage (divorce only after years of black eyes), her lovers, and her travels are interesting enough, but they pale beside the recapitulation of her thoughts as she shapes The Feminine Mystique. With due credit to the then-anonymous women who urged her on, Friedan recounts the founding of the National Organization for Women. She walks us through the controversies that were engendered within the movement by a growing opposition to her belief that men are not the enemy, and although she admits disarmingly that her opinions have changed on some issues—especially her feelings towards lesbians—she still maintains that male vs. female separatism is a mistake. As the separatists gained power, she dropped out (or was maneuvered out) of feminist centers of power and moved on to preach independently about “second-stage” feminism. With a million-dollar Ford Foundation grant now behind her, Friedan now continues her research and writes on the “new paradigm” of social organization (emphasizing such practical supports for working families as childcare). Although friends say she has mellowed, Friedan declares bluntly that “I’ve always been a bad-tempered bitch.”
On the personal side, a best-case scenario; on the political side, a brilliant thinker sets the adrenaline flowing all over again.Pub Date: May 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-80789-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
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