An academic report, including research projects that uphold ``women's ways of knowing'' and programs that allow women to grow by ``gaining a voice,'' that is both uplifting and redundant. Coauthor Belenky (Women's Ways of Knowing, not reviewed) is one of the researchers who probed the idea that women receive and process knowledge in a way different from men. With her University of Vermont colleagues (Bond, Psychology; Weinstock, Education/Social Services) she further explores how women develop as leaders, ``raising up'' rather than ``ruling over'' the next generation (as opposed to men's thinking in such matters, which is more authoritarian). The emphasis here is on a funded project carried out in rural Vermont called ``Listening Partners.'' The goal was to reach isolated women, bring them together, and help them develop independent modes of thought through mutual encouragement. As the women gathered in small groups organized by the authors, it was hoped (and affirmed) that they would move up through stages of thought (from ``Silenced'' to ``Constructivist''), and that the women would then be able to teach their children a more creative mode of thinking about the world. The book moves on to discuss observations of natural female leaders in small and large communities—``homeplaces''- -who achieve communal goals by nurturing individual strengths in their neighbors and emphasizing consensus and cooperation. Among the grassroots organizations examined are the National Congress of Neighborhood Women and two Mothers' Center groups, one in Germany and one in the US. Most of the women who practice what the authors call ``developmental leadership'' have their roots in African-American communities. Although the research and observations validate and celebrate female styles of leadership that flourish around kitchen tables and in church basements, the accounts of success stories are often muddled and repetitious, with far too much attention paid to how research projects were designed.
Pub Date: June 4, 1997
ISBN: 0-465-02605-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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