Whether or not you agree that parents deserve to hold on to vestiges of their pre-parenting years, for the most part,...
A scattered book “in defense of mothers everywhere who have had enough of the constant commentary…and guilt-inducing advice on something we might do far more enjoyably (and far better) left to our own instinctively irritable and lazy but loving devices.”
Many commentators decry our current navel-gazing, self-concerned society, and it can be especially difficult to navigate for new mothers and mothers-to-be. Social pressures and medical establishment expectations can make a dos and don’ts list a mile long. Waugh (Last Dance with Valentino, 2011), a relative of Evelyn, adds another book to the growing list of counteractive books, insisting that years of scientific research, common-sense knowledge distilled through generations of trial-and-error parenting, and all of those self-limiting prison walls people construct around themselves can be disregarded, provided it’s done with panache. The author even found a doctor who told her that it doesn’t really matter what substances you put in your body while pregnant. If children want to sit on the couch and watch a Harry Potter movie for the 10th time, they should be able to. After all, they will have adulthood to spend doing things they don’t want to do—unless they read this book, in which case they can cherry-pick which responsibilities to address. The general thrust of Waugh’s argument is “don’t worry, be happy,” which could be made convincing with more of a focus on skewering those specific areas that lead to obsessive-compulsive helicopter parenting, combined with some insight into how too much drive to “do the right thing” can also be damaging and lead to burnout. Instead, the author’s emphasis is focused more on making sure parents do “a little less fretting and hassling.”
Whether or not you agree that parents deserve to hold on to vestiges of their pre-parenting years, for the most part, Waugh’s message misses the mark.Pub Date: April 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62779-012-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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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