Profiles of a handful of women who have influenced American culture and politics. Ware (Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism, 1993) starts her book with an ambitious premise. Drawing on the lives of seven outsize leaders in the realms of politics, journalism, anthropology, acting, sports, dance, and music, she sets out to explicate the often difficult relations between private and public faced by American women. Though well-trod territory, the subject is perennially fascinating. However, the way she chooses to present these women—Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Thompson, Margaret Mead, Katharine Hepburn, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Martha Graham, and Marian Anderson—presupposes an intimate knowledge of them not necessarily shared by the reader. She puts out a casting call for “strong, independent characters”—a device that lends a chummy tone to the book that doesn—t necessarily make up for lack of documentation. As she launches into each profile, she explores these women’s professional lives as well as their personal relationships, and therein lies the problem. With the exception of Dorothy Thompson, substantial biographies have already been devoted to Ware’s subjects. Therefore, one cannot escape the feeling that more nuanced portraits of these women can be found elsewhere. By trying to place them under a larger canopy, Ware corners herself into writing synopses of the women’s lives: Eleanor Roosevelt had “a need to love and to be loved”; Dorothy Thompson “worked hard to make it as a woman in a man’s world”; Martha Graham had a “primal fear of being outside the limelight,” etc. The result is a few illuminating anecdotes, a brief analysis from the author on the psyches of her subjects, and an explanation of why these women were important. What is missing is the continuous thread that can tie all these women together, and the lesson women in America today can take from these pioneers. It’s not for lack of material that Ware fails to deliver what she promises.
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-393-04652-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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