In her foreword to Minding the Body, an impressive collection of writings by women about the female body, Foster recalls her grandmother, a miner's wife in the '30s, telling her, ``When I asked my doctor for some form of birth control after the exhaustion of 12 pregnancies he said impatiently, `You're a woman, Mrs. Baxter. That's what women are made for.' '' That was then; today the demands for bodily perfection, a prime socioeconomic asset, have given rise to another kind of oppression—an oppression of shame. As Nancy Mairs writes, ``The female population of the US suffers from the shame of falling short of an unattainable standard, the ideal woman'' as defined by the advertising, television, and movie industries. Have women advanced economically only to be restricted by the cult of physical perfection? In response, Foster has gathered writings in which writers explore their relationships to their bodies. The result is a collection of vivid portraits by 20 writers, including well-known writers like Margaret Atwood, Janet Burroway, Doris Grumbach, Naomi Wolf, Joyce Winer, Judith Hopper, and other lesser-known writers. (Six of the pieces are published here for the first time.) They describe the day-to-day business of dealing with cancer and chemotherapy, pregnancy and infertility, anorexia, aging, multiple sclerosis. They give the facts about diets and plastic surgery. They describe what it is like to live as a minority woman in a culture obsessed with Calvin Klein jeans and fashion statements that peculiarly objectify Third World women. It provides a wealth of information about the realities this generation of women have to deal with. Though depressing at times, Minding the Body is an inspiring testimony to the female spirit. It offers examples of women who have mapped their own roads, who, as Linda Hogan says, lead lives that demonstrate the connection between the love for one's body as it is and the love one feels for the natural earth.
Pub Date: May 6, 1994
ISBN: 0-385-47022-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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