Theoretical generalizations aside, these are engaging scenes from the most public chapter of an accomplished feminist’s life.
Autobiographical lessons from the education Conway received as the first female president of Smith.
In her When Memory Speaks (1998), Conway observed that “what makes the reading of autobiography so appealing is the chance it offers to see how this man or that woman negotiated the problem of self-awareness and has broken the internalized code a culture supplies about how life should be experienced.” This volume, the third installment of the author’s life (The Road from Coorain, 1989; True North, 1994), centers on the realizations and accomplishments Conway made in her decade (1975–85) at Smith’s helm. Viewing her calling as a “latter-day Christine de Pizan,” Conway sets about building an educational system that opens the doors of intellectual maturity to all women while avoiding the presidential pitfall of losing her autonomy to the institution. Her achievements are impressive. Conway’s inspired vision as a reformer of education not only enabled older women to return to college decades before catering to the nontraditional student came into vogue, but extended financial aid to welfare mothers and greatly expanded athletic programs to women, convincingly refuting the elitist assumption that women, sport, and academic prowess don’t mix. Most of this memoir does not detail the process by which this social historian achieved her goals; rather, it analyzes the psychological and intellectual effects of that experience. One might have hoped for a little more balance between method and meaning, given both the pioneering nature of Conway’s actions and the instructional tone of some of her reflections. Occasionally readers may feel in the midst of a primer for administrators of higher ed—not necessarily a flaw here, but a surprising emphasis for a writer so attuned to the emotional underpinnings of autobiography.
Theoretical generalizations aside, these are engaging scenes from the most public chapter of an accomplished feminist’s life.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-42100-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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