A cogent, vivid view that conveys the drama and urgency of the women’s liberation movement, from a writer who was both a committed activist and a critical observer, sometimes simultaneously. Although Brownmiller has written books on other subjects (e.g., Seeing Vietnam, 1994), she is still best known for her 1975 exploration of rape, Against Our Will. This new history/memoir explores the revolutionary decades that began in 1963 with Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a book that “changed my life,” says Brownmiller. She was attracted to the radical side of women’s liberation and recalls with pride and occasional bemusement the women who struggled to formulate new social theories, mine history, introduce consciousness-raising groups, and meld socialism and anticapitalism with the feminist revolution. The usual suspects—Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer—receive a share of attention, but the focus is on lesser-known activists, many already committed to the political left, active in the civil-rights and anti—Vietnam War movements and burgeoning New Left politics. Experienced in confrontation, these low-profile women organized meetings and demonstrations, wrote papers, published newsletters, and shared the dark corners of their lives with one another in consciousness-raising sessions. A collectivist bent led to the “trashing” of individuals who attracted the limelight (including Brownmiller herself, who as a successful writer had a higher profile). There was infighting, and splinter groups formed. Some, like the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, hung together and succeeded; others fragmented and disappeared. By 1975, according to Brownmiller, the early theorists and organizers were too inflexible and impractical “to triumph on the larger stage they had brought into creation.” But on that stage were core issues of rape, abortion, domestic violence, and sexual harassment around which all women could rally, although clashes continue over pornography, and abortion is once again under siege. Meetings, debates, demonstrations, church speak-outs, living-room confessions—all come passionately to life in this memoir; close to how it really was for women’s libbers.
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-31486-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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