A forthright behind-the-scenes account of the circumstances surrounding Conley's resignation as a tenured full professor of neurosurgery at the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1991. The author gained instant media attention by going public with the grievance that had caused her to act: sexism—or as she put it, ``I am minus the appropriate gender identification that permits full membership in the club.'' According to Conley, although more women than ever are now enrolled in medical school, an old (male) guard still makes the rules, creating a climate in which sexual harassment and gender discrimination are rife. Conley's career had nonetheless flourished for as long as Dr. John Hanberry was Stanford's chair of neurosurgery. But when Hanberry left in 1989 and Dean Korn of the medical school appointed her colleague Dr. Gerry Silverberg as acting chair, she soon found Silverberg's ``arrogance, his boasting, and overt sexism intolerable.'' Following her highly publicized departure, Conley received a strangely belated education in feminist issues from the women's movement. While the more personal chronicle of her feminist awakening has merit, the larger, more important story is really about discrimination in academic medicine. Those with a taste for intrigue will relish the details of the political maneuverings of all parties—Conley, her lawyer, Korn, Silverberg, and the associate dean who had been asked to hold investigative hearings about Silverberg's behavior. There is no happy ending. For although Conley eventually withdrew her resignation, and though Silverberg did not after all become department chair, the reforms that would have given equality to women in medicine did not take place—and Conley lives knowing that she'll never truly ``belong'' to the central ranks of her profession. Conley freely admits to being opinionated, outspoken, self- confident, and painfully blunt. All these trains are fully expressed in this revealing account.
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-28621-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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