A sobering look at the power of rumor.
An exploration of the high-school slut archetype, the conditions needed to apply the label to a particular girl, and the lasting results of being labeled in this manner.
While working at an alternative weekly newspaper in Seattle, freelance writer White placed a query asking, “Are you or were you the slut of your high school?” The response to her query was overwhelming. After interviewing more than 150 women, White discovered that the collected narratives showed distinct themes. The “slut story” did not seem to have an urban counterpart; the narrative flourished best in small-town and suburban areas. It was also a predominantly white phenomenon; stories told by African-American or Latina women followed different patterns. Focusing her research on white students, the author found several integral elements that had to be in place before a girl was so labeled. Students most likely to be designated a slut had experienced precocious puberty. She lived in a suburban setting where there wasn’t much to do. She didn’t grow up with the other students; she transferred in from another school. Many (but not all) of the girls had experienced childhood sexual abuse. (Some girls were virgins who could trace the origin of the rumor to a spurned boyfriend.) And finally, the condition of being multiracial in a predominantly white school was a strong indicator of being labeled. The sorriest aspect of White’s research shows that the girls internalize the rumors placed on them by others, and have great difficulty shedding their negative self-image. Many of the interviewees have considered suicide; some have made actual attempts. Moving away doesn’t seem to help; the author notes, “Throughout my interviews with adult women, I heard the story of the flashback: a man in a grocery store gives a grown woman a look that propels her back to high school, or the tone of a girlfriend’s voice suddenly recalls an earlier betrayal.” Being branded a “slut” during their formative years (some girls had been labeled as early as junior high, and carried the role for six years or more) has significantly damaged their prospects in life.
A sobering look at the power of rumor.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-684-86740-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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