Pollitt’s cogent opinion presents potent testimony on a woman’s right to choose.
A pro-choice proponent delivers a dramatic, persuasive argument for abortion.
Feminist poet and award-winning Nation essayist Pollitt (The Mind-Body Problem: Poems, 2009, etc.) succinctly delivers a personalized perspective on an issue that has always been a magnet for controversy. The author believes it is time for an expansive and fair-minded discussion in order to “put abortion back into its context, which is the lives and bodies of women, but also the lives of men, and families, and the children those women already have or will have.” Bolstered by dramatic statistics (“excluding miscarriages, 21 percent of pregnancies end in abortion”), personal interviews and historical references reaching as far back as ancient Greece and Egypt, Pollitt impressively makes her case while admitting that abortion clinics have become increasingly inaccessible and certain “pronatalist pundits” are holding women’s intimately private pregnancy decisions up for public scrutiny. The opposition has definitely made itself known, she asserts, and their movement has gained momentum in recent years. Abortion opponents have reframed their positions, swiveling away from the sexual morality core points to issues of bodily protection concerning a woman’s unborn “zygote/embryo/fetus” and to accusations of “murder.” Pollitt believes the anti-abortion movement has become both physically assaultive and gender-restrictive, stifling the authority women have gained across decades. Aside from discussing the American consensus on abortion rights and dispelling its associated myths, the author structures her arguments around absolutists who base their viewpoints on theocratic religious beliefs, political affiliations, flawed medical information or a general resistance to the progress of women’s liberation movements. She considers abortion an “urgent practical decision that is just as moral as the decision to have a child” and issues a passionate plea for the kind of deep social change necessary to destigmatize it.
Pollitt’s cogent opinion presents potent testimony on a woman’s right to choose.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-312-62054-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
PROFILES
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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