Affecting and inspiring.
The first book from the noted philanthropist focuses on women’s empowerment.
Gates explains that her public advocacy began with the conviction that women need the tools to let them decide for themselves when and whether to have children. But she soon realized that activism around discrete topics—e.g., contraception or girls’ access to school—was not enough: She needed to speak up for women in general. While it has long been understood that empowered women are key to the health of any community, in the author’s hands, the idea feels fresh, or at least energized. Even though she confesses that she didn’t always consider herself a feminist and that she found the idea of working for a wider women’s agenda overwhelming, Gates is a down-to-earth, likable narrator, and she has an eye for gut-wrenching tales. She introduces us to 11-year-old Selam, who spent a day cheerfully helping her mother prepare for a party only to be told, that evening, that she was to be married that night; and Meena, who, upon meeting Gates, told her she was unable to raise her two children and asked Gates to take the children home with her. Meena said that while she eventually learned about family planning, the education came “too late.” Unsurprisingly, the author, who earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and master’s in business from Duke, thinks that continuing to work on new technologies that can improve human lives is important, but just as crucial is the development of new and better “delivery systems.” What distinguishes this book from so many other depictions of women’s struggles around the globe is the author’s ability to connect Meena and Selam with women in white-collar workplaces in the U.S. Gates doesn’t just want rural farms to be rid of bias; she also wants offices in major cities to be “compatible with family life.”
Affecting and inspiring.Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31357-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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