A somewhat unfocused but heavily researched volume on the images and roles of aging women from Neanderthal times to the present. Banner (History/USC) calls this work a ``meditation'' rather than a conventional history, hoping it will provoke discussion and further investigation of the experiences of aging women. Her interest piqued by her own relationship with a younger man, she began a study of older woman/younger man pairings through history. Here, she is soon all over the lot, beginning with a lengthy deconstruction of Sunset Boulevard (aging film star/young screenwriter), then cutting to ancient Mediterranean civilizations in which older goddesses were known to dally with young men. Progressing unevenly through history, she visits at length with Sappho, Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Wife of Bath, Colette, and others—all of whom married or loved younger men. Banner's zigzag course is often distracting but in the end reveals an undulating historical line on which aging women are alternately sought after for their material or spiritual resources or are rejected because of their ``uncontrollable sexual urges'' (the uterus was once believed to be connected to the brain and menopause to drive women mad with desire) and propensities to witchcraft. Medical science began to get the biology right little more than a century ago, but that didn't prevent menopausal women from being considered fools or fishwives for the better part of the 1900's. A concise review of present-day attitudes about older women reveals confusion at best and, at worst, a shocking if faint tendency to consider aging women as witches or madwomen. In search of contemporary ``models for aging,'' Banner applauds black women as depicted in the works of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Banner achieves her goal—she certainly has provided launch pads for dozens of researchers and writers. And perhaps one of those will do a more successful job of picking up the threads and weaving a tapestry than she has done. (Illustrations—24—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 22, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-57943-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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