In this candid account, adoptive father Howells, aided by journalist Pritchard, makes a passionate but ultimately unconvincing plea for open adoption, a controversial alternative that seems to pose more problems than it solves. When Howells and his wife conclude that invasive infertility treatments are playing havoc with their psyches and their marriage, they easily make the leap into pursuing adoption as an alternative to childlessness. First, they fill out endless applications ``agreeing to assume the responsibility of any child . . . regardless of his or her racial, ethnic, physical, emotional or mental state.'' Then the Howellses become participants in a program that requires them to attend meetings of Adoption Network, a local organization that actively lobbies to change current laws that shield the identity of the adopted child's natural parents, and that helps individuals locate their biological family members. Soon they are chosen by Nancy, a pregnant high school victim of a date rape, to become the parents of her child. Within a few weeks, the Howellses become surrogate parents to Nancy, who later becomes ``Nancymom'' to her/their son. They become so emotionally involved with the girl, in fact, that when their infant son, David, comes home with them, they not only must adjust to their new role as parents, but must struggle with Nancy through her severe postpartum blues. In addition, they are forced to contend with the ambivalence of Nancy's mother, uncertain about her daughter's choice to relinquish the newborn. By David's fourth birthday, a married Nancy has a second baby, whom David sees as his brother. The Howellses will not be providing David with a sibling, because they are too emotionally spent to pursue another adoption. The Howellses' complex experience is hardly the alternative to traditional adoption that will appeal to prospective adoptive parents. Despite the author's obvious sincerity, he is more likely to dissuade people from pursuing open adoption. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-31886-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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