Well-rendered portrait of a specific milieu, with a dash of politics thrown in to hold it all together.
Former Reuters journalist Eaves reflects on her years as an exotic dancer in Seattle, the path that led her there, and why she’ll never go back.
“I had a deep distaste for clothing as a child,” she tells us. Other than a fondness for nudity, however, Eaves seemed to exhibit few girlhood indicators for her eventual stage work, raised as she was by scholarly parents who emphasized the importance of intellectual achievement over all other. But it was this exclusive focus on the cerebral, the writer insists, that made her all the more determined to explore gender issues and sexuality, which began puzzling her as soon as she hit adolescence and was confronted with a seemingly arbitrary moral universe. Irritated by the rules required of nice girls, she became fascinated with what she perceived as the sexual freedom enjoyed by strippers. After graduating from college and moving in with her boyfriend in Seattle, she finally took the plunge and began dancing naked at the Lusty Lady. Twelve months passed and she gave it up, moved on, and got a graduate degree at Columbia; years later, however, she was driven to return to the exhibitionist profession to explore why, exactly, she’d done it in the first place. Her personal justifications for taking up dancing (pursuit of personal freedom and stereotype-busting) and giving it up (it was screwing with her behavior in relationships) are unremarkable. The strength of the work lies in her non-sensational, balanced look at her coworkers, with all of their singular histories, and at the backstage of a strip parlor, with the attendant headaches of workplace etiquette and labor relations.
Well-rendered portrait of a specific milieu, with a dash of politics thrown in to hold it all together.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41233-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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
PERSPECTIVES
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