An essentially conservative book that will fortify the opinions of fans of marriage.
The author of Home Comforts traces the history of marriage vows in Western society and argues for their continued relevance.
Making frequent references to her own two marriages—one unhappy and short-lived, the other happy and long-lasting—Mendelson analyzes the evolution of traditional marriage vows from their beginnings as a variant on the feudal vows held between lord and vassal in medieval times. The author clearly favors the traditional Anglican vows, crafted by “prose master” Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in 1549 and still in wide use today, largely unchanged except for the excision of the vow by women to “obey” their husbands. “The very act of taking marriage vows in a ceremony has a powerful psychological effect,” writes Mendelson, and “the traditional vows are short and dramatic,” as opposed to vows crafted by the couple, which she believes evoke more chuckles than deep-felt tears. The author dives deeply into each element of her subject, from the commitment to staying together “in sickness and in health,” which is “the oldest, the clearest, and, one supposes, the most likely to be fulfilled,” to the vow to “forsake all others,” a more recent and less universal vow. As she segues from historical analysis to broader philosophical discussions of contemporary marriage, Mendelson also shifts to optimistic blanket statements—e.g., “Western-style monogamy, with its equal genders and social freedoms, is an institution honed into workability and high satisfaction after a few millennia of trial and error and insight gathering”; “almost everyone wants unending love, which means that they want marriage, even if they don't understand that they do”; the number of marriages that end in divorce says very little about the staying power of love.” Questions about the shortcomings of matrimony find no place in this chatty survey.
An essentially conservative book that will fortify the opinions of fans of marriage.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781668021569
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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