A collection of admirably textured and often painfully honest writings. The bond between sisters is one of the most intimate and complicated relationships, and as many of the contributors point out, it has too often been belittled or left unexplored. These pieces are mostly nonfiction, and more than half of them are published here for the first time. There is strong writing from women with sisters who are mentally ill or retarded, sisters with multiple sclerosis or who commit suicide or disappear. Competition and jealousy are explored, as is the confusing and often agonizing struggle to find a separate identity (``I'm you,'' one five-year- old said to her six-year-old sister; ``We're me,'' her sister agreed). Interestingly, editor Foster (ed., Minding the Body, 1994) also includes two outside perspectives—from women who don't have sisters. Some of the gems of the collection are Joy Williams's short story about elderly, childless sisters who find a baby in their mailbox; Debra Spark's memoir about her sister's death from cancer; Robin Behn's essay on her sister's conversion to Buddhism; and Lucy Grealy's meditation on what having a twin means—and what it doesn't mean. Not surprisingly, given that many of the contributors' sisters are still living, some of the first-person essays attempt to sugar-coat the pain and anger they express, ending with Pollyanna-ish odes to sisterhood. bell hooks, who, growing up, was shunned by her five sisters for being ``crazy,'' writes compellingly about feeling left out and about the way the girls criticized each other's bodies and policed each other's sexuality; yet she ends with the declaration that she and all her sisters ``know the joy of sustained sisterly bonding.'' (For more on this special bond, see Brenda Peterson's Sister Stories, p. 1475.) Despite the occasional lapse into platitudes, a powerful collection; women with and without sisters will find many of their feelings expressed here with eerie accuracy.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-47128-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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
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