Overly inclusive, but focused and smoothly written—a solid contribution to the history of gay literature.
Admiring, exhaustive portrait of a pioneering lesbian author.
Confidence and the courage of her convictions served as powerful forces against homophobia in the life of Jeannette Howard Foster (1895–1981), writes Passet (History/Indiana Univ. East; Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality, 2003, etc.). Growing up in Illinois, Foster accepted with equanimity and enthusiasm the sexual and emotional attractions she felt toward her own sex. She had crushes on female Sunday school and grade-school teachers; at the University of Chicago, she wrote poems with titles like “Sapphics to One Called Helen.” Prejudice against homosexuals did, however, steer Foster’s life in two significant directions that ultimately proved rewarding. Lacking role models, she became a voracious reader, tracking “coded” lesbian characters in literature. She also sought employment where lesbians felt comfortable, at libraries and all-female colleges. Library work afforded Foster the opportunity to catalogue thousands of printed works about lesbians, crossdressers and bisexuals. For three decades she searched out relevant titles, being careful not to arouse the curiosity of librarians who might have disapproved of her project. In 1948, she signed on as a librarian with the Kinsey Institute, which afforded her further access to sources relevant to her study. Given the repressive climate of the McCarthy period, not even a university press would touch Sex Variant Women in Literature, Foster’s richly detailed, landmark study of more than 300 titles written between 600 BCE and the early 1950s. She was forced to pay a subsidy publisher, Vantage Press, for its 1957 release, and it didn’t get many reviews. It did, however, electrify a rising generation of lesbian activists. This pioneering achievement gets slightly buried under a surfeit of minimally relevant detail: excerpts from Foster’s poems; descriptions of her lesbian-themed short stories; the title of a girlfriend’s dissertation; notes on Foster’s late-life problems with arthritis, insomnia and constipation.
Overly inclusive, but focused and smoothly written—a solid contribution to the history of gay literature.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7867-1822-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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