by Elaine Showalter ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001
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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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