A searingly honest debut memoir by a leader in the fight for a woman's right to “legally gain and exercise reproductive choice—the power of life and death.”
Hoffman—founder and CE0 of Choices, one of the largest women's medical facilities in the country and editor of the quarterly magazine On The Issues—writes about how stultifying she found the expectations for women as she was growing up. She explored the idea of living an artistic life but lacked a true calling until, by chance, in 1970, she answered an ad for a part-time job as assistant to a New York City family doctor. New York State had just legalized abortion, and her employer, Dr. Martin Gold, saw this as an opportunity to position his HMO as a leader in providing abortion services to women. He and his partner opened the Flushing Women's Medical Center, one of the first ambulatory abortion facilities in the country, and she managed the office for them. The next year, she and Gold established Choices, with her as director. The clinic pioneered in the new field of women's-health services, offering alternatives to mastectomy as well as abortion services. She writes animatedly of the exciting first few years when the trajectory of the women's-rights movement was on the upswing and she became one of its leaders as her relationship with Dr. Gold deepened—ultimately leading to marriage. Then the right-to-life movement regrouped. By 1985, there had been 150 attacks on abortion clinics, and the author received numerous death threats. An inspiring story of a woman who participated in “one of the greatest revolutions in history”—and is still at the forefront of the struggle.
Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55861-751-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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