Not much new here—at least for female readers—but should provide women’s-studies classes with points for discussion. (16 pp....
A sociologist looks at why hair matters so much and what our concerns about hair have to say about who we are, as well as who we hope to be.
In researching her subject, Weitz (Sociology/Arizona State; ed., The Politics of Women’s Bodies, not reviewed) held two focus groups with women over 50 and two with teens—one of heterosexuals, one of both lesbians and bisexuals—and she interviewed 74 girls and women varying in age, ethnicity, social class, religion, sexual orientation, and, of course, hair color and style. After an all-too-brief introductory chapter on the history of women’s hair, she turns to these conversations to examine what they reveal about the role hair plays at various stages of life, from childhood to old age. With liberal use of quotes, she demonstrates how young girls are taught to value hair, how the media affect teenagers’ ideas about appearance, and how they use their hairstyles to explore their identities and make statements about their desire to fit in or stand out from the crowd. Subsequent chapters explore how hair figures in women’s intimate relationships, sometimes becoming a battleground for power struggles, and how women adopt certain styles to compete in the job market. Weitz also looks at the camaraderie provided by hair salons, where women develop warm relationships with their stylists and with other women. Women who have lost their hair through illness share their feelings about baldness, revealing the impact that hair loss often has on one’s self-image and self-esteem. Similarly, women whose hair has faded to gray or is thinning out discuss how these changes of aging affect their perceptions of themselves and the different ways they cope or elect not to cope with them. Weitz acknowledges the pleasure hair gives girls and women, but she is deeply concerned about the cultural expectations about female appearance that lead to obsessions about hair. Her aim is to free girls and women from what she calls “the bonds of the beauty culture,” and her final chapter, aptly titled “No More Bad Hair Days,” offers some advice on achieving this goal.
Not much new here—at least for female readers—but should provide women’s-studies classes with points for discussion. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-24082-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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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