Sander, a therapist and associate director of continuing education at Sarah Lawrence, records the stories of a young black woman, her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother as they tell of their childhood and of raising children as teenage mothers. Looking back on their early lives, all four generations speak of their need for male companionship after their fathers left their respective families, and their lack of confidence that they could succeed without their fathers. The bulk of Sander's interviews are with Leticia, who became pregnant with her first child at 16. Now 20, she is currently enrolled in a YMCA program to prepare young mothers for their high-school equivalency tests. Her resilience is impressive as she talks about her life: her parents' divorce when she was three, ten years of sexual abuse by her stepfather (which further destroyed her confidence), a severe beating by her crack dealer that sent her to the hospital and convinced her to drop her habit. Leticia boasts of her role at the YMCA—``They see me as a leader here''—but as she begins to reveal the overwhelming stress of keeping an apartment for her children, she confides, ``I don't know where they get this feeling from here, that I'm in charge or something...I don't feel that way.'' Later, after Leticia loses custody of her son to her boyfriend's family in a court case, Leticia's grandmother voices the suspicion that Leticia deliberately lost the case in exchange for money to buy crack. Sander concludes that she, too, is overwhelmed by Leticia's life, but insists ``there is no choice but to try'' to help to reduce teenage pregnancy rates. The answer, she says, is to expand the role of the public schools to offer poor teens health care, birth control, counseling, and concrete alternatives to repeating the patterns of their families. Sander's interviews stand as a powerful testimony for urgent action, and her recommendations seem right on the money.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-15-111638-5
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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