An enthusiastic endorsement of the healthy and passionate sex lives of the Victorians. In recent years, academic historians and literary critics have revised the long-held view that the Victorians were prudish, repressed, ignorant, and miserable in matters of sex. Canadian historian Anderson (The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, not reviewed) popularizes that scholarship and adds her own breezy survey of Victorian sexual habits. She looks for and finds a public preoccupation with sex in the period's popular romance novels and magazines; poetry by clergymen and clergymen's daughters; manuals of advice for married men and women; advertisements for women's underwear, contraceptive devices, and patent medicines. Deploring the 20th century's separation of sex from passion and the control of sexual knowledge by medical professionals, Anderson praises the Victorians for their skill at coy flirtation, erotic euphemism, and sustained marital happiness. She acknowledges that changes in conventions governing the discussion of sexuality make it difficult for modern readers to recognize the valuable aspects of Victorian sexuality, but remains baffled by the persistence of the idea that the Victorians were prudish and repressed. On that point the author is unfair to the many turn-of-the-century critics of sexual repression whose cries of pain about the Victorians' guilt, hypocrisy, and sexual ignorance created the image Anderson deplores. These critics may have oversimplified, but they directly experienced negative aspects of Victorian sexuality that the author glosses over, such as the lack of ready access to contraception, guilt over masturbation and pornography, and the targeting of prostitutes and gay men by ``social purity campaigns.'' Striving to be fair to the Victorians, Anderson draws up a largely positive balance sheet, but she tends to lose sight of the unhappy, helpless, and isolated victims of the period's sexual fears.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-08991-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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