Spirited, intellectually sexy reading.
A British columnist and gender activist’s gutsy analysis of how neoliberal capitalism has taken the “ideals of freedom” and transformed them into “strategies of social [and sexual] control.”
The global financial collapse of 2008 revealed that neither the market nor the mainstream feminism that claimed to have made inroads into it was woman-friendly. The violence that accompanied the Occupy movement three years later only confirmed the radical inequality that underlay the social, political and economic systems of the developed world. In this book, which seeks to smash “the machinery” of 21st-century neoliberal capitalism, New Statesman contributing editor Penny (Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism, 2008, etc.) examines the current state of feminism in a money- and power-obsessed world. Drawing on her experiences with anorexia and mental illness, she explores the impact of “good girl” narratives of perfection on women, who are expected to cultivate their “erotic capital” rather than their talents to succeed both socially and financially. Men, whom the author sees as plagued by confusion, self-hatred and self-doubt, also suffer under neoliberal capitalist tyranny. A bisexual woman living and loving on the edges of both British and American cultures, Penny observes that inter- and cross-gender relationships form the basis of the “ritual dehumanization” and objectification of women by men. Since neither females nor males are free from misogynist ideology, neither finds true sexual fulfillment or freedom. The one possible space of liberation is the Internet. Through its emphasis on the written word, it allows women the promise of temporary release from the “weight and anxiety” of the female body. Fraught as it is with the visual lures of pornography and the dangers of bullying and stalking, cyberspace is still a place where revolutionary new forms of personal, sexual and political networking/organizing can take place, helping to overcome prevailing sexist social and economic systems.
Spirited, intellectually sexy reading.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-689-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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