Here, German radical feminist ThÅrmer-Rohr (Women's Studies/Technische UniversitÑt, Berlin) offers a provocative, unsettling, and maddeningly inconclusive critique of women's roles in ``male'' society. Written between 1983 and 1987, these 11 compelling but repetitive essays, rendered into lean, urgent prose by translator Weil, bristle with rage and contempt. The anger is directed at our ``eminently stupid and fateful march into disaster,'' as exemplified by the despoiling of the environment and the development of nuclear power. And since the bomb is a ``symbol of civilized patriarchal thought,'' the scorn is reserved mostly for those ``laughable and embarrassing,'' morally ``bankrupt,'' ``past and present criminals''—men. Not that women are let off the hook. By entangling themselves in the ``normal doings of male society'' and backing up men by providing and maintaining homes, they are accomplices to their own slavery. Also suspect, and masterfully dissected, are various New Age and ``transformational'' theorists, whose embrace of ``feminine'' values appears as yet another condescending and exclusionary tactic. Solutions? Well, ThÅrmer- Rohr is explicitly anti-utopian, disillusioned by Marxism, and distrustful of all future-oriented, ``hopeful'' philosophical constructs. She says a lot about ``resistance,'' ``protest,'' and the necessity of ``cross-thinking,'' presumably toward some gynocentric alternate to androcentric horrors, but she doesn't quite say how to get there or to what purpose—nor where men fit into this. Real life crashes through the furious lecturing only when ThÅrmer-Rohr deals with the letters that her father, an Evangelical priest and Nazi, wrote home before his battlefield death. This forced exposure to good existing alongside unspeakable evil, passionately analyzed, might have made for a powerful book- -but ThÅrmer-Rohr chose to write this one. Shedding lots of heat, but nary a glimmer of light, the essays ultimately implode upon themselves, producing only bewilderment and a bit of laughter.
Pub Date: Aug. 19, 1991
ISBN: 0-8070-6756-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
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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