A hopeful celebration of women’s friendships.
A journalist examines the nature and impact of the friendships women form with each other.
Society traditionally views female friendships as competitive and transitory. Schaefer argues that more women than ever are actively working to reclaim their relationships with each other from negative stereotyping. Drawing from popular culture, interviews with a wide range of successful female professionals and her own life, the author suggests that current trends stem in part from generational changes. A product of mid-20th-century culture, Schaefer’s mother lived during a time when adult female relationships with anyone beyond children and husbands were considered “nice, but not essential.” On TV and in film, bonds between women—e.g., those between the main characters of the 1980s blockbuster show Dynasty—were characterized as catty and vindictive, with women ruthlessly fighting each other over men. In the 1990s, developments like the Riot Grrrl movement and films like Thelma & Louise attempted to inspire female empowerment, but “mean girl” stereotypes—which the author found herself playing into—continued to flourish and undermine more positive depictions of female bonding. As a young career woman in the early 2000s, Schaefer, who preferred male friendships, was uninterested in “helping any other women through their lives.” Her awakening came in her early 30s when she decided against marrying a long-term boyfriend. She realized that her strongest allies were other single, motivated women who were also “striving to do good work.” Looking around her, she saw young women like singer Taylor Swift and Olympian Kim Vandenberg extolling female friendships and social media trends like #squadgoals and #girlsquads honoring the help and support women could give each other. Though the author focuses mostly on bonds between white females, it is still a welcome reminder during a time of political backlash against women that females are continuing to insist on “changing the rules themselves.”
A hopeful celebration of women’s friendships.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98612-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
