A brief but sensible entry in the abortion wars.
A law professor brings her learned perspective and anecdotal evidence to one of the world’s most controversial topics.
A former Planned Parenthood volunteer, Oberman (Santa Clara Univ. School of Law; When Mothers Kill, 2008) admits her pro–abortion rights stance, but her short book rarely veers toward polemic. Instead, she shows how those on both sides tend to marginalize the women whose lives are already marginalized and that, for those women, “abortion’s legal status hardly mattered.” The author predicts that if the anti-abortion movement continues to gain momentum, laws against abortion won’t stop them or even decrease them. Her approach is somewhat scattershot, but she focuses first on El Salvador, which “has the strictest abortion laws in the world.” Since the passage of an absolute ban in 1998, the abortion rate has not dropped; enforcement is selective and charges are rare, mainly brought upon women in dire circumstances, many of whom have suffered a miscarriage or lack of prenatal care but haven’t submitted to the abortion procedure. Furthermore, writes Oberman, “the rate of abortion in countries with restrictive abortion laws far exceeds that of countries with far more liberal laws, as in the United States.” She suggests that those campaigning hardest to reverse the liberalization of abortion policy are mainly engaged in moral posturing, knowing that the procedure they condemn will not decrease but will be increasingly stigmatized and driven underground—or to the internet, where drugs that can terminate a pregnancy are far safer than the old cliché of the back-alley abortionist. Perhaps the most illuminating part of the book concerns the compassion the author found at Birth Choice, which offers a safe haven for women who keep their babies and where there is “no shame, just love.” There she heard that there are “two kinds of pro-life people. People who are pro-life and people who are antiabortion…and the antiabortion folks are really difficult to work with.”
A brief but sensible entry in the abortion wars.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4552-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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