Readable and mildly interesting, but shallow and sloppily reasoned—which is a disappointment from someone of Showalter’s...
Feminist scholar Showalter (Sister’s Choice, 1991, etc.) stirs together literary history, biography, personal reminiscence, and pop culture in a peculiar narrative that devotes as much time to female thinkers’ dysfunctional private lives as to their public achievements.
The opening pages set the tone, with a strained analogy between the childbirth-related death of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797 and the car crash that killed Princess Diana 200 years later. Both women, Showalter (English/Princeton Univ.) claims, are “feminist icons,” a pairing that trivializes the author of Vindication of the Rights of Women and hyperbolically identifies the Princess of Wales as a “courageous activist.” Subsequent chapters on Margaret Fuller, Olive Schreiner, Eleanor Marx, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman display the author’s gift for cogently summarizing current scholarship, though they convey little new information. “Heterodoxy in America” and “Heterodoxy in Britain” contain intelligent mini-biographies of lesser-known but important figures such as American anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons and English pacifist Vera Brittain. But even granting that the personal is political, the author pays an awful lot of attention to her subjects’ sex lives and physical appearance, especially in the sections on Mary McCarthy, Simone de Beauvoir, and Susan Sontag. She also devotes an excessive amount of space to fellow academics like Ann Douglas, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Eve Sedgwick—all strong writers and thinkers, but hardly “icons” in the wider culture. A sharp portrait of Germaine Greer and an acid one of Camille Paglia are more relevant to Showalter’s alleged topic (the feminist intellectual tradition, in case you’d forgotten), but the closing section on Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Diana shows how catch-all her choice of subjects really is. Her argument that this eclectic group “reflects both cultural change and the span of identification that goes far beyond the academic and political” is both unconvincing and muddily expressed.
Readable and mildly interesting, but shallow and sloppily reasoned—which is a disappointment from someone of Showalter’s stature.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-82263-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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