Timely and relevant, particularly in the age of Trump and #MeToo.
A young woman raised as a conservative Evangelical Christian reflects on her community's sexual shaming and the psychological scars that it left.
By any normal standards, Klein's first relationship was about as good as it gets; her high school boyfriend was smart, good-looking, and respectful, and he made her knees buckle. But the author wasn't raised with normal standards. In her community, governed by a strict Evangelical church, not only was sex forbidden, but the onus was on women to enforce that nearly impossible rule. While men were forgiven for impure thoughts and actions, girls and women were blamed for "eliciting men's lust." After Klein and her boyfriend kissed, she panicked, worried that she had committed an unpardonable sin. Citing a message from God, she ended the relationship. Though she eventually distanced herself from the church, the community's view on women and sex left an indelible mark. (At hyperliberal Sarah Lawrence College, she was probably the only virgin on birth control to ask for a pregnancy test, just in case.) Klein examines the damage through an admirably candid look at her own personal life as well as extensive interviews with women (and one trans man) who were raised in similar circumstances. In between anecdotes, the author quotes a variety of sources, from feminist Jessica Valenti to the magazine Christianity Today. In a particularly mind-boggling passage, the author writes that some purity advocates suggest that women set aside "date nights" for Jesus. Klein's personal story is fascinating, but it is the larger context that makes the book important. Politics, religion, and gender are more inextricably linked than ever before; Vice President Mike Pence, for example, is part of the purity movement and doesn't allow himself to be alone with any woman other than his wife, to avoid temptation. In the context of this book, that fact becomes all the more harrowing.
Timely and relevant, particularly in the age of Trump and #MeToo.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2481-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
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