This first book by a founding editor of Men's Journal is an impressively researched biography of an undersung leader in the American birth control movement. Mary Ware Dennett was at the forefront of several reform movements of the early 20th century, including the suffragist movement and feminism. Unlike her rival birth control activist, Margaret Sanger, who courted publicity shamelessly, Dennett is not well known; this is the first biography of her. Dennett's dedication to sex education and birth control evolved out of her own experience. Suffering serious physical consequences form the births of three children, Dennett was advised by doctors not to have any more, yet they never mentioned contraception; Dennett and her husband stopped having sex altogether. Her husband fell in love with another woman; their custody battle and divorce trial were widely publicized. Devastated by the breakup of her family, Dennett threw herself into suffrage work. In 1915, unable to find for her sons material on sexuality that was neither moralizing nor overly clinical, she wrote a pamphlet called ``The Sex Side of Life: An Explanation for Young People.'' This short work became quite popular and was distributed even by the conservative YMCA. But it led to Dennett's conviction in a celebrated 1929 trial after the pamphlet was seized under the Comstock laws. Chen explores Dennett's emotional and political lives with equal care, quoting liberally from revealing correspondence, such as love letters between Dennett and her husband. Unfortunately, though, Chen pushes her own moral agenda as heavy-handedly as any early 20th century reformer. Writing, for example, about the Dennetts' marital problems, Chen charges, ``After a few generations, such dissolution of the family could only mean the ultimate disintegration of civilized life.'' Despite her gracelessly wielded value judgments, Chen has made a strong contribution to the history of birth control, feminism, and sexual mores. (25 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 13, 1996
ISBN: 1-56584-132-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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