Decter is correct in saying that people are complex; she herself is a good example. At the same time, she’s not hard to...
Former Harper’s editor Decter (The New Chastity, 1972, etc.) offers a memoir that displays her ability to cut through the blather of received opinion and her talent for cranky, narrow-minded attitudinizing.
Though she waves the flag of neoconservatism, Decter can be a peddler of the kind of horse sense that feels like a cooling breeze on a hot afternoon. The most valuable of such have to do with feminist dead-ends, like the idea of all men being the enemy—a notion toxic to the project of overthrowing sexism—or Betty Friedan’s woefully inaccurate take on the joy of being a male breadwinner. Decter has always believed that molds are for jello, not humans: Organizational Man? Second Sex? People aren’t so neatly compartmentalized. Decter plumps for personal responsibility, good manners, respectful language—who says no?—but then she skates onto thin ice with remarks about everybody having “made his or her own bed to lie in,” a sentiment denying factors such as class, race, religion, and the extremes of poverty. By the time she’s heading up the Committee for the Free World and associating with the Heritage Foundation, Decter (it seems) finds her neocon credentials more important than any native intelligence. She refers to George McGovern as coming from the “hard left” and alludes to our “national anxiety attack” over Vietnam as if the nobility of that war were a foregone, undebatable conclusion. Her memory becomes selective: She recalls images of South Vietnamese pleading to be evacuated with US embassy personnel but forgets those of children screaming in the aftermath of a US napalm attack. And who knows what to make of remarks such as “lesbianism being something it is possible to outgrow” or gay men actively courting AIDS “because society is putting up so little resistance to their demands”?
Decter is correct in saying that people are complex; she herself is a good example. At the same time, she’s not hard to pigeonhole: file her under right wing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-039428-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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 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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