At last—a serious counterthrust against the popular self-interested praise for welfare reform. Even if you hated the recently abolished welfare system, the glee with which the poor were demonized could be discomforting. There is something unseemly about observing the well-to-do chastising the impoverished and then preparing to reap the financial benefits. In response Mink (Political Science/Univ. of Calif., Santa Cruz) goes beyond questioning myths, exposing hypocrisy, and offering sympathy; she offers a positive argument for welfare as a fundamental right. In this society, mothers are unpaid workers. If they're also single and poor, they are workers uniquely at risk: While their occupation is essential and usually highly praised, if they pursue it seriously, they will find themselves in dire straits. Welfare originated in this country as a solution to this quandary, a recognition that women with children lacking a working husband or independent financial means need assistance if they are to function as mothers. In the prosperous 1990s, we have cast aside this commitment, and Mink argues that we have gone beyond heartlessness and denied poor, single mothers a necessary element of citizenship. Moreover, establishing parenting as a right and recognizing the need to support it would lessen gender inequality where it really counts: care-giving to children. In fact, of course, the odds of a popular upswell in this direction are dismal. Despite lip service given to traditional concerns and family values, welfare reform attracted approval not only from Republicans and opponents of women's issues, but also from more surprising constituencies, including some in the mainstream women's movement. As long as groups like the latter find, for example, challenging glass ceilings in the workplace for middle- and upper-class women more compelling than championing the cause of poor women in the home, Mink's courage will be commendable but probably not fruitful. Something to think about as the time limits on welfare support start kicking in.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8014-3347-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
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
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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