An impassioned analysis, at times overly insistent.
The noted environmentalist was inspired by a love affair.
Maxwell, professor of political science and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, offers a celebration of queer love and a critique of heteronormativity through her examination of the intimate friendship between Carson (1907-1964) and Dorothy Freeman (1898-1978). The two met in 1953, when Carson built a house neighboring that of Freeman and her husband in Southport, Maine; their immediate emotional bond deepened through the years. Maxwell describes the friendship as “queer” because it “drew them out of conventional forms of marriage and family”; furthermore, she asserts repeatedly, the relationship changed Carson, whose writing “became more vibrant, passionate, and urgent after she fell in love,” empowering her to write Silent Spring (1962), her exposé of the deleterious effects of the unregulated use of pesticides and insecticides on human and nonhuman life. As Maxwell sees it, failure by biographers to account for the friendship’s significance in Carson’s writing of that book “reinforces the ideology of what I call ‘straight love.’” The affair, Maxwell argues, shifted Carson’s perspective on nonhuman nature, fueling her desire “to sustain the vibrant multispecies world that helped create their love.” Although Carson had established herself as an acclaimed nature writer before Silent Spring, still Maxwell asks, “Would Carson ever have realized that nature is a source of ‘wonder,’ if she had not met Freeman, and scripted their love, with her, as a source of wonder?” Setting Carson and Freeman’s love in the context of her own queer relationship, Maxwell encourages everyone to “become more attuned to their queer feelings, what those feelings might teach them about themselves,” and “what politics they might want to engage in.” Reading Carson and Freeman’s letters, Maxwell declares, have taught her that “queer love can change the world.”
An impassioned analysis, at times overly insistent.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781503640535
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Stanford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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