A heartfelt book about an inspiring model of wisdom, self-awareness, and thoughtful engagement with the world.
The story of a man who exalted personal responsibility for systemic change.
In this combination of memoir and political critique, Jensen (Journalism/Univ. of Texas; Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialog, 2013, etc.) pays homage to Jim Koplin (1933-2012), his mentor, friend, and lover. The two met in 1988, when Jensen was a University of Minnesota graduate student researching feminist responses to pornography, and Koplin, a volunteer at the Organizing Against Pornography office, agreed to be interviewed. Despite their 25-year age difference, the men felt an immediate bond, which they discovered stemmed from traumatic pasts. Koplin’s father had been violent; Jensen’s youth, which likely involved sexual abuse, was so troubled that he had developed dissociative amnesia. They both felt “not-normal,” recognizing similar quirks in each other as their friendship deepened. Although Koplin resisted being called Jensen’s “intellectual guru,” he was clearly more than an academic mentor, offering guidance through long conversations and abundant letters. Jensen admits that he was “inadequately prepared” for graduate work: naïve, not well-read, and unable to think critically about political, social, ethical, and environmental issues. On the subject of sex and gender, for example, he had been “an apologist for patriarchy” until Koplin pushed him to “think in terms of hierarchy and power” and leave his “liberal bubble” for “a more radical, and honest, analysis of myself and the world.” Portraying himself as “a pretty typical American,” Jensen believed that a “conventional narrative of U.S. benevolence” justified foreign policy, until Koplin gave him a “crash course” about U.S. relations in the Middle East. The author praises Koplin's “comprehensive and consistent radical left/feminist/anti-racist/ecological politics,” his frugal lifestyle, and his rejection of consumerism.
A heartfelt book about an inspiring model of wisdom, self-awareness, and thoughtful engagement with the world.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59376-618-4
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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