Dynamite examples rendered in funny, spirited writing.
Feisty, unapologetic forays into the messiness of gender relations.
In these essays, most previously published, outspoken feminist Kipnis (Radio/TV/Film/Northwestern Univ.; How to Become a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behavior, 2010, etc.) fashions a fitting companion to her previous, self-described “conflicted” work on femininity, The Female Thing (2006). Male types—e.g., “the Con Man,” “the Manly Man”—fascinate the author and offer a way inside the male psyche in order to find out what men really think of women—and why we should care. Refreshingly, Kipnis operates by plunging into her subject, getting her hands dirty, her critics be damned—for example, reading back issues of Hustler magazine before interviewing publisher Larry Flynt—“the Scumbag”—which director Milos Foreman would not do when he made his film The People vs. Larry Flynt. Declaring the contents of the porn rag downright “Rabelaisian,” however gross, Kipnis offers some admiration that Flynt built his empire from the idea of fighting sexual repression. The author provides lively examples for each of her “types”: “Humiliation Artists,” like recently disgraced politician Anthony Weiner, are really all variations of the eponymous shame-seeking hero of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. “Cheaters,” like Tiger Woods, can only operate successfully due to the phalanx of women who possess “willing self-abnegation.” “The Trespasser” of Jackie Onassis’ privacy, photographer Ron Galella, is now elevated as an “artist,” and his aggressive stalking of his muse has been airbrushed. Kipnis reserves the final section for “Haters,” namely critics like Dale Peck, right-wing biographers of Hillary Clinton and even radical feminist icon Andrea Dworkin. Unafraid of offending the cause of political correctness, Kipnis is the kind of unfettered, freethinking observer who even questioned the nature of “unwanted sexual advances” at her school’s harassment workshop: “But how do you know they’re unwanted until you try?”
Dynamite examples rendered in funny, spirited writing.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62779-187-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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