Recommended as an alternative perspective on an often emotionally fraught discussion.
Journalist Sandler (Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement, 2006), an only child and mother of one, examines research, literature and anecdotal accounts on “singletons” who have been maligned as lonelier, less social and more troubled than peers raised with siblings.
The author also surveys attitudes toward parents of such children, who were often thought to be wealthier and more selfish. Through articles in popular magazines, current views in psychology, personal observations, interpretations of biographies on famous political and cultural figures, interviews, an 1895 study by Granville Stanley Hall, Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children, and other sources, Sandler discovered little evidence supporting the pervasive, negative perception of only children. She also found that contradicting studies, which revealed only children to be more successful, with higher self-esteem and better self-adjustment, remained largely unnoticed. The most intriguing section of the book features research on children born in China’s one-child–policy environment; less compelling chapters consider family size from demographic and economic perspectives, both in Europe and the U.S., with the expected conclusion that few, if any, adults base their consideration of whether or not to have additional children on larger trends. The author's take on this controversial subject, which emphasizes the positives of raising one child, may be misread as an attempt to justify her lifestyle, but she does not criticize those who do choose larger families (some of whom she explores in a chapter on Christian evangelicals). Sandler also carefully notes her own occasional ambivalence. Though it’s not likely to sway those readers who believe strongly in having multiple children, the author’s argument dispels stereotypes of "onlies" and raises provocative questions about the American tendency toward prioritizing and even elevating parenthood over relationships, individuality, social networks and other aspects of adulthood, sometimes to the detriment of the family.
Recommended as an alternative perspective on an often emotionally fraught discussion.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2695-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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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