Enlightening reading that debunks numerous myths about female anatomy.
This personal and political guide examines why we've been led to ignore or be ashamed of a crucial anatomical structure.
In her first book, journalist Enright, who grew up in Ireland and now lives in London, moves freely between her personal experience and the broader societal landscape while making sure to recognize those whose experiences are different from her own, including members of the transgender community. Early on, she makes it clear that she is discussing not just the vagina, but the vulva, which many women, and probably even more men, have trouble defining or precisely locating. According to one 2016 study, writes the author, “60 per cent of British women were unable to correctly identify the vulva.” Sex education, she argues, is sorely lacking both at home and at school, in part because, to the extent that it's taught it all, far more attention is paid to male anatomy than to female, with a particular disregard of female sexual pleasure. She set out to remedy that situation with this book, moving briskly, thoroughly, and often amusingly through the topic in chapters with such titles as “The Orgasm, and Why Everything's Normal” and “The Clitoris, and How It's Ignored.” Many will relate to Enright’s candid descriptions of struggles with painful menstruation and infertility and with her fears about the onset of menopause. With sisterly authority, she opens up areas for discussion that have often been ignored. She pays particular attention to debunking anatomical misperceptions, as in a fascinating chapter on the hymen, which is not at all the “taut…film-like membrane” it's often assumed to be. Though the tone of the book is often light and lively, Enright doesn't shy away from justified outrage when she discusses female genital mutilation or the fact that women's pain is often disregarded by the medical community.
Enlightening reading that debunks numerous myths about female anatomy.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-911630-02-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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