Often scattershot but never boring, Chesler's memoir will raise more than a few hackles.
The author of Women and Madness (1972) looks back with a sharp eye at her sometimes-contentious engagement with the second-wave feminist revolution launched in the 1960s.
Working from evidently voluminous diaries, Chesler (Emerita, Psychology and Women’s Studies/CUNY; Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing a Veiled War Against Women, 2017, etc.) constructs a frequently scattered and highly entertaining account of her undomesticated life. Born in 1940 and brought up in Brooklyn by Orthodox Jewish immigrant parents, she rebelled early and often and was delighted to find fellow rebels among other mid-20th-century feminists. Though she made some lasting friends, her delight wasn't enduring, and she devotes much of the book to settling scores with former friends and delineating the “incomprehensibly vicious behavior among feminist leaders.” She was scorned by many of her peers because she was a “man junkie” and “hopelessly straight.” Readers familiar with figures like Gloria Steinem and Andrew Dworkin will either be delighted or appalled by gossipy accounts of consciousness-raising groups where, for example, lesbian activist Jill Johnston “cried and made a scene—she actually threw potato chips at us—then left and refused to return.” Chesler describes one of her comrades as a “lesbian lush” and another as “a hot Jewish tamale.” Those who don't already know the major players are likely to be confused, since the author tends to drop names without much elaboration. Some of her claims—e.g., that “every woman I knew had had an abortion”—strain credulity, and the chapter titles suggest the author’s chatty, rapid-fire approach to narrative: “Fame Hits Hard, Thousands of Letters Arrive, I Marry Again”; “I Travel the Wide World, Pray at the Western Wall, and Come to the Aid of Lesbian-Feminists Under Siege in Mississippi.”
Often scattershot but never boring, Chesler's memoir will raise more than a few hackles.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-09442-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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