Calling for ``gender independence,'' freedom from the tyranny of masculine and feminine stereotypes, Burke (Family Values: Two Moms and Their Son, 1993; Atomic Candy, 1989) relies more on anecdote and example than on theory and sustained argument, thereby giving current discussions on gender a human face—and a wider audience. Worried that growing up in a man-free household could condemn a boy to Robert Bly's ``father-hunger,'' Burke, who adopted her lesbian partner's son, decided to learn what she could about gender roles so as to do a better job in her role as mother. She divides her findings into categories: behavior, appearance, and science. ``Behavior'' takes a chilling look at some psychologists' and psychiatrists' efforts over recent decades to use behavior modification techniques, and even drugs, to make children conform to gender stereotypes. The most worrying people in these case studies are the researchers themselves, notably the male scientist who describes a four-year-old boy as having ``slovenly seductive eyes.'' Burke maintains that although over time the rhetoric of such studies has become less sexist and homophobic, the ``assessment and treatment'' of children is essentially unchanged. The book's next section deflates the idea that the body's appearance somehow reflects its true nature. Here Burke makes her case not only with studies but with light-hearted looks at two shrewd and empathic experts in creative cross-dressing: Diane King, who lets women experience ``male authority and territory and entitlement,'' and Miss Vera, who sees feminine clothes as ``props'' bringing men in touch with a hidden side of themselves. The section on science briefly addresses physical differences between genders. After touching on topics such as the brain (no convincing gender difference) and testosterone (which doesn't cause aggression), Burke quotes Dr. David Schwartz, who asks if it isn't ``time to admit that the search for biological determinants of gender has met with failure.'' Thought-provoking reading on the creation of gender identity for anyone who has a child or has ever been one.
Pub Date: July 6, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47717-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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