A thoughtful meditation on the intersection of life and art.
An intimate look at motherhood and creativity.
Years ago, when her now-college-age children were in elementary school, Phillips, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for James Tiptree, Jr., began wondering if “maternal bliss conspires with maternal guilt to erode creative work.” Interweaving personal reflections with biographical sketches of British and North American writers and artists, she considers a question that has vexed them all: “How can I have children without sacrificing my vocation, my perspective, my independence, my mind?” The book takes its title from an accusation made by the in-laws of painter Alice Neel: When she was trying to finish a painting, they claimed, she left her baby on the fire escape. Like Neel, other women struggled to find time and space for mothering: Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Carter, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Shirley Jackson are among many whose lives and work Phillips explores. “I’ve tried to look at the moments when their maternal or creative selves seem to fall apart,” writes the author, “when they get lost in the woods and come out—if they do come out—with new insight, and with themselves changed.” Their responses to motherhood range from rebellion to celebration. Lessing abandoned her two toddlers, explaining that she was leaving them “to fight economic injustice and racism.” She soon longed for them and pleaded with her estranged husband to allow her to see them; after two years, he finally gave in, not without criticizing her political views and unconventional lifestyle. Le Guin, on the other hand, felt nourished by her family, and “she claimed authority by leaving home in her work, writing about male protagonists in invented worlds.” Phillips admits there is no simple answer to her overarching question, although A.S. Byatt comes close: “What you have to learn to do is pay complete attention to two things at once.”
A thoughtful meditation on the intersection of life and art.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-08859-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
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
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