Mernissi is as bracing and intelligent as Scheherazade—and her grasp of sexual politics, both East and West, is not just...
A savvy treatment of that ultimate piece of emotional baggage: sex.
“Why did the enlightened West, obsessed with democracy and human rights, discard Scheherazade’s brainy sensuality and political message in their versions of the tales?” wonders Mernissi (Dreams of Trespass, 1994, etc.). In the Middle East, after all, her cerebralness was the essence of her sexual attraction. The Eastern harem and the Western approach to sexuality may share needs of power and control, then they diverge radically: How in one cultural landscape sex is associated with obsequiousness and a decided lack of intellectual exchange, while in the other “the most efficient weapon with which to arouse a man is words” and the contest of self-determination. This sparks the author’s exploration into the psychic differences of men, East and West. Hers is a decidedly cerebral trip in itself, delving into the cosmic and spiritual dimensions of belly-dancing, the narratives of Persian miniatures, the paintings of Ingres, Kant’s notion of the sublime and the place of women, Poe’s assassination of Scheherazade, the feminism of Shirin in the Iranian Shahnameh, and (most ludicrous to Mernissi) the “bizarre separation between feelings and reasoning” that has come to typify Western sexuality (precluding “the harmonization of expectations and needs, which can only be accomplished when the two partners use their brains”). Many of the conclusions will sound familiar: “If intelligence is the monopoly of men, women who dare to play clever will be stripped of their femininity” and “Western man manipulates time and light. He declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look fourteen years old.”
Mernissi is as bracing and intelligent as Scheherazade—and her grasp of sexual politics, both East and West, is not just piquant but spot-on.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-1242-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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