Despite repetitive language, this anthology will appeal to fans of women’s short-form confessional nonfiction.
Women writers present vastly varying perspectives and journeys of the meaning, cost, and fulfillment of their wishes.
Kahn and McMasters, editors of This Is the Place, take a similar tack in this second compendium of personal essays. Their introduction lays out their sincere yet sappy aims—e.g., “to create a space for women to interrogate and luxuriate in their desire.” The editors cast a notably wide net, although several essays would have benefitted from tighter editing. While the majority of pieces are engaging, frequent unoriginal word choices wear thin—desire appears nearly 250 times. The contributors explore myriad topics related to wanting objects (a $500 pair of cowboy boots, a dildo) in addition to experiences, which run the gamut from criminal to spiritual but are predominantly sexual. Tracing longings to their roots, many of the essayists deploy powerful metaphors that possess the capacity to connect women to themselves. The cowboy boots, for example, signify far more than footwear. “The opposite of a cowboy is an Indian woman,” writes Rena Priest. “I exist in the aftermath and ruin wrought by cowboys….I desire the power available to the self-assured cowboys of the American West.” In a stunning consideration of the enjoyment she takes in being sexually degraded by her White husband, Keyanah B. Nurse both implicates and empowers herself: “I center my own pleasure.” Long stymied by self-doubt, Domenica Ruta acknowledges craving “that feeling of control I first discovered in my abortion…the knowledge that my body would do exactly what I wanted it to do.” In an excellent study of Thomas Merton’s thorny relationship with his yearnings, Amanda Petrusich writes, “It’s a brutal cycle—we want things, we get things, we want more things, we get them, we want more.” By turns piercing and bloated, the book’s core magnetism lies in its breadth of voices and their respective depths. Other contributors include Larissa Pham, Karen Russell, Lisa Taddeo, Camille Dungy, and Melissa Febos.
Despite repetitive language, this anthology will appeal to fans of women’s short-form confessional nonfiction.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781646220113
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
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
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
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