An easy read with lots of good anecdotes, a dose of history, and some surprising statistics, but its focus on one segment of...
A feminist journalist argues that single women, who now outnumber married women in the United States, are changing society in major ways.
Between 2010 and 2015, New York Magazine writer at large and Elle contributing editor Traister (Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women, 2010, etc.) interviewed nearly 100 women across the country, selecting from them some 30 whose stories she relates here. Many of them are women like herself—college-educated New Yorkers—which gives her book a definite slant. Before letting these women talk about their lives, the author turns to prominent women of earlier decades—Anita Hill, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem—and to single ones of earlier times who were abolitionists, suffragists, labor agitators, and social reformers. The present, writes Traister, “is the epoch of the single woman, made possible by the single women who preceded it.” Through her interviews, she explores their friendships with other women, relationships with men, sex and social lives, careers, freedoms, activism, independence, loneliness, living arrangements, and choices about children. At times, the author inserts her own story into the narrative, but she underrepresents the lives of poor women, minorities, and older widows. Although too often absent from the text, the needs of such women are recognized in an appendix that outlines changes in policies in wages, insurance, housing, welfare, and health care and in attitudes toward reproductive rights and family structures that single women must demand. If single women possess the political power that Traister attributes to this growing population (“a citizenry now made up of plenty of women living economically, professionally, sexually, and socially liberated lives”), big changes are on the way.
An easy read with lots of good anecdotes, a dose of history, and some surprising statistics, but its focus on one segment of one generation of single women is a drawback.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1656-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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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