by Shere Hite ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1995
Hite raises some audacious and crucial questions about sexual socialization in the family while conspicuously shying away from others. The noted documenter of sexual mores (Women and Love, 1987, etc.) turns to the experience of family to find out what we learn in our early years about love, intimacy, gender roles, and sexuality. This most recent Hite report is based on the written responses of more than 3,000 women, children, and men in 16 countries to an 80-item questionnaire. Some of her conclusions are fascinating challenges to popular assumptions: Many girls masturbate to orgasm by the age of five; in woman-headed households girls have better relationships with their mothers than girls in two-parent households. Other findings are more expected: Children feel isolated by being forced to sleep alone and by a lack of physical affection from the age of about seven until their mid- teens. As in past Hite reports, the respondents' own words make fine, voyeuristically pleasurable reading. However, Hite is often annoyingly vague and selective about which data she chooses to reveal, often calling particular feelings or responses ``rare'' without giving any percentages. How rare is ``rare''? How much is ``most'' (e.g., ``Most men and boys say they were taunted...with phrases like, `Don't be a sissy' '')? Equally frustrating is Hite's refusal to identify her respondents by race, class, age, and nationality. She justifies this by explaining that she ``dislikes the idea of categorizing people.'' But in devoting separate chapters to boys, girls, mothers, and fathers, she assumes that gender—a ``category'' if ever there was one—will affect the responses. Yet the experience of patriarchy is mediated by numerous other cultural factors, and the social changes that Hite heralds cannot possibly be taking place for everyone in the same way. A provocative contribution to public debate over ``family values,'' though ultimately too evasive too satisfy. (First printing of 50,000; first serial to Ms.; author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8021-1570-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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by Shere Hite & Kate Colleran
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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