by Jessica Mitford ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 6, 1992
From the author who 29 years ago roasted the funeral industry in The American Way of Death: a witty, pungent, comprehensive look at the frequently unfortunate practices that guide how American babies are born. The struggle over abortion has overshadowed many other issues that affect American women. Twenty years ago, giving birth was high on the list of women's concerns. Natural childbirth, Lamaze, midwives, birthing clinics for normal deliveries, even home births were widely discussed and practiced by many pioneering women. Surgical techniques, including Cesareans and episiotomies, were questioned, and often scorned. Mitford's telling investigation of American birthing practices today reveals that little has changed, and that in some cases things are worse. For instance, the infant mortality rate in the US puts it 24th among industrialized Western nations—a rate that could quickly be reduced if out-of-control hospital and doctor costs were reallocated to prenatal care. If this book doesn't pack the surprises that Mitford's exposÇ of funeral homes did, it's only because the issues have been in the air for so long. What Mitford brings to them are hard numbers, revealing interviews, and astute observations, pointing the finger at practices like speeding up normal labor to accommodate the doctors, not the mothers. Or at midwives who are driven out of practice because doctors and hospitals refuse them backup (a throwback, Mitford wonders, to the medieval view of midwives as witches?). And, of course, poor and uninsured women, often most in need of superb medical care, who are treated at best offhandedly, at worst with actual cruelty. Informed choice is the course Mitford recommends—but the choices must be available. An epilogue reviews the rocky history and problematic future of some form of universal health insurance for the US. Indispensable for prospective parents who may discover that they can just say no to doctor-dictated birth practices and can prescribe their own terms for having a baby.
Pub Date: Nov. 6, 1992
ISBN: 0-525-93523-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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