By combining expert legal discussion with affecting personal memoir, Bartholet offers an important exploration of the...
A seminal volume on the worldwide mindset that allows orphaned or unwanted children to waste away in institutions while childless adults struggle to breach the barriers that keep them from building families.
Harvard Law School professor Bartholet writes from both personal and professional experience. She's the mother of a now-adult son born during a youthful marriage, as well as of two younger sons—aged four and seven—adopted when they were babies and she was a not-so-young divorced professional who wanted another child but could no longer conceive. Bartholet went through the humiliating process familiar to many, from facing doctors who explored and experimented with her reproductive system—with the implicit suggestion that she was unworthy since she could not become pregnant—to making applications for adoption and taking subsequent tests that probed her personal history from her early relationships with her parents through her current sex life. The author ultimately found her children in Peru—but only after enduring desperate weeks of frustration and fear as authorities sent her to and fro for physical and mental exams and in search of documents, official stamps, and verifications of her worthiness. Bartholet admits that she was lucky: her knowledge of the system; the flexible schedule that enabled her to take months off while she navigated the Peruvian bureaucracy; her financial resources and Harvard credentials—all let her take home the infants she fell in love with. But why should it be so difficult? she asks. Why should there be barriers against interracial and international adoptions when the need is so great for both children and their potential parents?
By combining expert legal discussion with affecting personal memoir, Bartholet offers an important exploration of the societal barriers to adoption, as well as invaluable support to would-be parents who face these seemingly insurmountable obstacles.Pub Date: May 10, 1993
ISBN: 0-395-51085-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
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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