Here comes the judge—and perpetrators in family court with their attorneys must pray that it isn't Judge Judy Sheindlin. She makes advocates of Tough Love look like marshmallow liberals. As a family court judge, Sheindlin deals with juvenile criminals, custody disputes, and so-called deadbeat dads, among other cases. After 23 years in the New York City court system, here are some of the ideas she advocates: To send teenage births plummeting, parents should be required to financially support their teenage children's children—sans welfare; foster care parents should be trained and licensed; parents on welfare should lose their benefits if a child drops out of school; and women who have more than one crack-addicted baby should be incarcerated. Here's another recommendation: Book a juvenile criminal as an adult—fingerprints, photographs and records that can be shared. (One chapter subheading reads, ``If Your Killer is Only Fifteen, Are You Any Less Dead?'') In essence, she says that America celebrates victims, but not the victims of crime. Instead, it is those perceived as victims of the social safety net, who have neither money or love enough to steer them from wrongdoing. Nonsense!, says Sheindlin. Every person is responsible for his or her acts, whether it is having babies or doing drugs. On the other hand, she is a strong advocate of birth control and of joint custody for parents. Mom is not always the best nurturer, says the judge, departing from conventional wisdom. (The book's title, which is of questionable taste, is a comment borrowed from her father.) Pithy and opinionated, with many real-life case histories, this book is an eye-opener for the politically left and an ``All Right!'' cheer for the right. ($50,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017321-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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