A potentially controversial suggestion that women fetishize food, among other things. Hoping to ``dismantle certainties about what constitutes perversity,'' with the ultimate goal of expanding the limits of sexual diversity, British academics Gammon (Cultural Studies and Product Design/Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design) and Makinen (History of Ideas/Middlesex Univ.) review the history of fetishism and describe three types: anthropological, commodity, and sexual. They further posit a fourth type, food fetishism, most clearly linked with the sexual. The authors propose stages, or intensities, for all four categories of fetishism, for which the definitions vary and are theoretically difficult, but have in common a ``process of disavowal...objects in our culture take on meanings that connect them to, or stand in for, other meanings and associations.'' The easiest category to comprehend is the sexual, when an object (such as a shoe) is used instead of a person for sexual pleasure. The authors devote a significant amount of text to ruling out things that are frequently thought of as fetishes, and other things that could be. Despite the widely recognized phallocentric bias of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, they remain at least partially within its framework, even though Freud believed that fetishes grew out of male castration anxiety and thus didn't believe that women had fetishes. The authors maintain that women have always fetishized in a variety of ways, and they provide a persuasive theoretical argument that women fetishize food, pointing to the widespread phenomenon of eating disorders in the Western world. They end with a reading of fetishism that suggests postmodernism has as much to offer to the understanding of women and fetishism as does psychoanalytic theory. Their valiant effort to read women into psychoanalytic theory mixes in postmodern analyses in an attempt to acknowledge the full range of female fetishism. Intriguing and almost—but not quite—persuasive. (13 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 21, 1995
ISBN: 0-8147-3071-X
Page Count: 236
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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
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
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