A dry, bare-bones biography of Myra Bradwell (1831-94), whose plea to practice law was denied by the Supreme Court because she was a woman, and who went on to become the publisher and editor of the influential Chicago Legal News. In telling Bradwell's story, Friedman (Law/Wayne State University) labors under two considerable constraints. The first is the paucity of original source material (Bradwell's family gave her correspondence with Mary Todd Lincoln—who was a friend as well as a client—to Robert Lincoln's estate, which destroyed it because it dealt with Robert's consignment of his mother to a mental hospital). The second problem is Friedman's apparent wish to fit Bradwell into the politically correct pantheon of feminist heroines. It's true that Bradwell worked hard through her journalism to initiate reforms ``in the areas of women's rights, child custody, the legal system, treatment of persons alleged to be `insane' ''—she was largely responsible for Mary Todd Lincoln's release from the mental hospital—and to make the Chicago Legal News the most widely circulated legal newspaper in the country. But, reflecting her era, she was also an anti-Semite; an elitist; a woman who distanced herself from what she perceived to be the strident and polarizing approach of leading suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and a believer in the ``ethos of `true womanhood'—sensible and devoted mothers, wives, and daughters uniting together to ask of their fathers, husbands, and brothers the right to vote.'' Still, Bradwell's considerable accomplishments are revealed in her own writings, which offer an impressive record of more than two decades of legal criticism, advocacy, and astute business acumen. More legal brief than biography as the personal Myra Bradwell is subsumed in the political figure—but a welcome revival of a forgotten reputation.
Pub Date: May 17, 1993
ISBN: 0-87975-812-0
Page Count: 215
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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
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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