A powerful report on a relevant women’s movement deservedly brought to light over a century after it occurred.
Historical survey of an early-20th-century initiative to control “promiscuous” women through forced quarantines.
In the 1910s, citing venereal disease as one of the largest culprits of military disability, the U.S. government created what was called the American Plan, which resulted in thousands of women being incarcerated for their perceived contraction and transmission of sexually transmitted infections. Stern adapts his prizewinning Yale University graduate thesis on the subject for general readers. The result is a dramatic re-enactment of the plight of these involuntarily quarantined women, personified through the life of Nina McCall, a teenager who was targeted by health officials as a disease carrier (she was declared “slightly infected” with gonorrhea) and coerced into admitting herself into a women’s detention hospital. Bolstered by the advent of neoregulationism, whereby health officials—not police—would filter, outlaw, and imprison women for disease and suspected prostitution, officials held the mass-arrested women for months on often sketchy evidence. Eventually, after simmering resentment turned to sheer outrage, a resistance movement began to develop, and dozens of women escaped, rioted, enacted hunger strikes, or set fire to their facilities in protest. According to Stern’s meticulous research, others, including McCall, took the legal route and sued government officials for the torturous and barbaric “curative” treatments they had endured in the detention facilities. Using letters, diaries, articles, and archival records, the author intricately re-creates McCall’s world and brings much-needed attention to the struggle of these persecuted women and their fight for justice. The author spotlights McCall’s trial testimony, where she became a radical voice against female oppression and abuse and an inspiration to others. The book’s academic tone is direct, informative, exacting, and well-suited for the grim subject matter it addresses, and it puts a face on the treacherous, sexist injustices committed by a misguided government.
A powerful report on a relevant women’s movement deservedly brought to light over a century after it occurred.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-4275-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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