Overwhelming and at times wearying, but nonetheless an instructive look at previous battles over knowledge and suppression...
Extremely detailed study of how 19th-century Americans imagined sex and the resulting court battles over obscenity.
The period, writes Horowitz (American Studies/Smith; The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas, 1994), was “engaged in a complex four-way conversation about sex.” The first of the “four primary voices” she discerns was traditional bawdy humor, passed down through generations mostly in oral form but including such books as Fanny Hill. These frank works soon became targets of evangelical Christians, the second partner in this conversation. The third, and the one given the most space by Horowitz, is the “voice” of reform physiology, which here includes everything from the first medical books on birth control to the European notion that masturbation caused insanity. (The author also throws in a brief mention of John Humphrey Noyes’s utopian colony in Oneida, New York, and a quick survey of prescriptive literature.) Woven into this third section is the emerging world of an urban male “sporting” culture devoted to the pursuit of pleasure without thought of obligations or consequences; this culture gave rise to weekly newspapers that contained frank material about sexual matters. It is here that Horowitz turns to a study of the press, libel, and obscenity, noting that in addition to delivering erotic material, the weeklies possibly extorted money from their readership, for example by threatening to reveal the names of those who visited brothels. The final voice in this conversation comes from reformers promoting sexual liberty and adherents of free speech. The magnitude of Horowitz’s aims sometimes makes for a daunting read: a discussion of the Comstock Law requires an extensive review of the origins of the Y.M.C.A.; the history of an 1873 statute suppressing obscene literature dictates a lengthy portrait of free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull.
Overwhelming and at times wearying, but nonetheless an instructive look at previous battles over knowledge and suppression in a culture that remains “profoundly divided over questions of morality and its relation to government.” (86 illustrations)Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-40192-X
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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