An uplifting celebration of women’s power through communion.
A quirky, wide-ranging look at women’s lives.
Tasmania-based writer and musician George-Allen makes an engaging book debut with “a memoir of learning, and unlearning,” motivated by her realization that despite being a feminist, she had “internalized misogyny.” In a patriarchal society, writes the author, women are discouraged from banding together because “isolated women are easier to sell things to, easier to control, more easily compressed into the very few ways to acceptably be a woman.” Hoping to counter the assumption that all women are “catty, backstabbing, untrustworthy bitches,” she set out to investigate women whose identities are connected to their senses of community: teenagers banding together to follow fashion trends or protest gun violence; girl bands; beauty vloggers and bloggers who “construct a narrative completely devoid of the male gaze”; sportswomen who find emotional power in training their bodies; dancers; midwives, who provide “the purest expression of care for women, by women, with women”; sex workers; farmers; nuns (“a whole bunch of women hanging out together, doing secret spiritual things”); and witches. “If a witch is a woman on the margins,” writes the author, “then we’re all witches.” Dance, she discovers, serves as more than artistic expression. “The women I spoke to,” she writes, “use dance to preserve culture, tackle body dysmorphia in refugee girls and facilitate discussions about race and intersectionality.” Although ballet has been criticized for insisting that dancers “spend a lifetime whittling their bodies into ethereal objects,” George-Allen finds, instead, that it gives women a chance “to be unapologetically physical, to strive for athletic excellence, and to be rewarded with unadulterated praise.” One of the most interesting chapters focuses on transgender women. As a straight, white, cis woman, the author grappled with the question of what makes a woman, finally concluding that gender is complex and socially constructed, “like money, or manners: imagined, held together by shared belief.” As she talked with a friend who transitioned, the author admits, she felt her own identity transform from “a whole, dull thing” into “a million brilliant bits.”
An uplifting celebration of women’s power through communion.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61219-834-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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