Roosevelt’s advice may no longer be strictly relevant, but the book is still valuable as a historical document.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s first book, a tract of practical advice aimed at women, is back in print.
Roosevelt was known for many things: her writing, her activism on behalf of women’s rights and racial equality, and, of course, her long term as first lady of the United States, a role she redefined. “I shall have to work out my own salvation,” she said, realizing that she was too full of intelligence, energy, and vitality to sit by and host parties. Her first book was published soon after her husband took office. Written in the midst of the Depression, this new edition features an introduction by New Yorker writer Jill Lepore. With chapters on “Budgets,” “Family Health,” “Women and the Vote,” “Women and Working Conditions,” and “Women and Peace,” the volume spans both the private and the public spheres. Roosevelt discusses the importance of budgeting one’s time, finding inexpensive sources of recreation, and the viability of holding down a job while married. “The very best thing that comes to a woman with a job,” she writes, “is the fact that she has to use her brains in order to find time for both her job and her home duties. This keeps her brain from stagnating.” Whatever the topic, Roosevelt’s advice is insistently practical—e.g., the average family spends 38 percent of their income on food and 25 percent on rent, which is a fine guideline, but a budget should be adjusted to fit each family’s needs, since “every one’s needs are different.” Throughout, the narrative is wholesome and heartening if occasionally naïve: “I think before many years…we shall see very little difference in the earning capacity of women as compared with men.”
Roosevelt’s advice may no longer be strictly relevant, but the book is still valuable as a historical document.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-56858-594-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
