A spiritual quest that encompasses the roots of family and friendship - it will resonate with the women of Banner's...
Reflections on a friendship initiated 40 years ago in high school and reestablished across an ocean and a great cultural and spiritual divide.
Banner (In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality, 1992) and her friend Fran gravitated to each other in Inglewood (Calif.) High School, where football players were heroes and pom-pom girls their consorts. Banner and her friend were athletic, academic, and ambitious - that is, out of the popular mainstream. They supported and nurtured each other, with Fran's mother, Lydia, an artist and musician, providing inspiration for Banner, whose mother had died. The two friends' paths diverged at college, with Banner moving on to graduate school in New York City, an upwardly mobile marriage, and feminism. Fran's path was spiritual; with her first husband, she helped to found the Lama community in New Mexico and ultimately converted to Islam, settling with a second husband in Alexandria, Egypt, changing her name to Noura, and wearing the veil of the Muslim woman. How could two friends, so similar in adolescence, have taken such different paths? asks Banner. She doesn't answer that question exactly, but in the attempt she describes the bridge generation of women who came of age in the late 1950s, already rattling the cage of June Cleaver but not yet free of primary commitment to home, husband, and children. Banner is now, she says, a pupil, if not a devotee, of a Sufi practice once popular at Fran's Lama community. Exploring the past that brought them to these crossroads, Banner delves into family histories. Disturbed by Fran/Noura's willingness to submit herself to her husband, Banner is nevertheless encouraged by a new view of Muslim women, exemplified by Fran and by Jihan Sadat, that permits them to think, study, and act as powerful individuals.
A spiritual quest that encompasses the roots of family and friendship - it will resonate with the women of Banner's generation and beyond. (25 photos, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 10, 1998
ISBN: 0-231-11216-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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