A well-argued case that gives feminist substance to Amelia Earhart's firm place in the national pantheon. Ware (Modern American Women, 1989, etc.—not reviewed) contends that, in her roles as aviator, teacher, author, wife, and media personality, Earhart personified the ill-defined feminism of the 1920's and 30's. As she sketches the familiar Earhart saga- -illuminated by the two transatlantic flights that made her a national heroine—Ware places it firmly in the context of the era, when the organized struggle for women's equality had given way to what she calls ``liberal feminism,'' the celebration of individual achievement. In the nine years between Earhart's first transatlantic flight, in 1928 (on which she was a passenger, not the pilot), and her disappearance nine years later somewhere in the Pacific, Earhart often made the annual lists of the ten or fifty or one hundred most-achieving women, along with her friend Eleanor Roosevelt. What gave Earhart credibility wasn't only her courage and daring but her campaign to encourage women to step away from traditional pursuits and spread their wings. They could do what she'd done, literally or figuratively—so ran her message in speeches, newsreels, magazines, books, and a column for Cosmopolitan. Ware suggests that, as credible as Earhart's achievements were, she was also—thanks in great part to the marketing efforts of her husband—a forerunner of today's media personality; but the author's attempt to equate Earhart's boyish appeal with the mysterious sexuality of Garbo and Dietrich is unconvincing. What happened over the Pacific? No solutions are offered here, only a debunking of the rumor that Earhart's Pacific flight was really a spy mission—a notion, Ware says, that surfaced in the wake of a Rosalind Russell movie loosely inspired by the aviator's career. Strong in discussing Earhart as an advocate for women's equality, weaker in establishing her as an icon of popular culture. (Photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03551-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
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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