An important book that will rally free-speech feminists and civil libertarians of all stripes.
The definitive feminist critique of MacKinnon/Dworkin anti-pornography laws, by ACLU president and legal scholar Strossen (Law/New York Univ.).
Since the late 1970s, feminist discourse has been dominated by the anti-pornography voices of law professor Catharine MacKinnon, writer Andrea Dworkin, and their followers, whom the author dubs "MacDworkinites.'' MacDworkinites hold that pornography should be suppressed because it causes (and is itself a form of) violence against women. These feminists have forged what Strossen calls "frighteningly effective alliances'' with religious fundamentalists staunchly opposed to women's rights. This alliance has won victories on many fronts: in Canada, where obscenity laws have been interpreted as embodying MacDworkinite standards for pornography (e.g., whether the work of art "dehumanizes'' women); on campuses, where draconian speech codes cover "sexually suggestive looks.'' Dworkin and MacKinnon are great communicators, but Strossen proves their match. Her response to them is tough, clear, and pithy. She offers a host of reasons why MacDworkinite measures actually imperil civil liberties: The laws are a "hopelessly vague'' curtailment of free speech; they will be enforced unevenly by traditionalist governments against disfavored groups such as feminists, gays, and lesbians; they perpetuate the stereotype of women as victims requiring protection from the patriarchy; they distract us from concrete discriminatory conduct. Strossen also explores the MacDworkinite ambivalence toward sex in general: On the one hand, both MacKinnon and Dworkin portray sexual conduct as inherently degrading to women—as rape; on the other hand, both express themselves in hot-and-heavy language that the author gleefully quotes. Sometimes Strossen's attacks seem personal and petty, as when she chides MacKinnon for avoiding debate and mocks Dworkin for having two of her own books seized at the Canadian border under anti-pornography statutes. But her counter- argument is firmly rooted in both the First Amendment and the real world.
An important book that will rally free-speech feminists and civil libertarians of all stripes.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-19749-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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
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
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