A witty and insightful cultural analysis.
City Journal contributing editor Hymowitz (Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age, 2007, etc.) examines how the career-first trend among young Americans has led to social and economic gains for women and a destabilization of gender roles for men.
In this witty book, the author argues that the shift toward an information-driven economy that began in the 1990s has created a major demographic event she calls “preadulthood.” The author describes this new stage of life as “a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance.” Preadulthood usually begins in college, where more women than men now earn four-year degrees. From their early 20s to early 30s, these young people often wander “from job to job…city to city, country to country” as they attempt to determine what they want to do with their lives. When they settle into a stable work life, it is typically in a knowledge-based profession. Many of these jobs—especially those in teaching, communications and health care—are dominated by women brought up with the idea that “[c]areer and independence [are] required. Love, marriage, husbands, and children entirely optional.” Confronted with the rise of the “alpha female” and pop-culture icons who often glorify adult male childishness, many men go into a state of slovenly “arrested development.” Sex, beer, and video games become the focal points of goalless lives that can extend into early midlife and even beyond. No such laxity exists for professional women, whose lives have the added constraint of a relentless biological clock. Hymowitz neither critiques feminism nor apologizes for modern male behavior. Rather, she offers enlightened observations to help women and men—who still say they want careers and families—make sense of cultural paradigms no longer based on the traditional life-scripts that once delineated gender roles. Women must come to better terms with their biology and hold males to greater account, while men must dispense with the self-destructive “navel-gazing” and “man up.”
A witty and insightful cultural analysis.Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-465-01842-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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