Well researched, well crafted: sure to be welcomed in women’s-studies programs.
A myth-dispelling look at the work of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, illuminating their debt to the unrecognized female storytellers who provided them with most of the tales in their collections.
German scholar and translator Paradiz (Elijah’s Cup, 2002) corrects two widely held but contradictory beliefs: first, that the brothers Grimm were the authors of the stories that bear their name; second, that they traveled about the German countryside collecting them from simple peasants and farmers. Their sources, she reveals, were actually educated middle-class and aristocratic young women, though it’s true that their collections were prompted by the desire to preserve German culture against the threat of French dominion during the Napoleonic wars. Inspired by the success of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, a collection of German folk songs, Jacob and Wilhelm set out to preserve the nation’s cultural past by creating an anthology of its fairy tales. The daughters of the Wild family, neighbors and close friends of the Grimms’ sister Lotte in the Hessian town of Kassel, were their first source, followed soon afterward by the Hassenpflug daughters from another Kassel family. None were credited by the brothers, who presented their stories (in approved Romantic fashion) as representing the true folk spirit of the region. By the time the second volume of their anthology was underway, they had met the von Haxthausens, an aristocratic family with several storytelling daughters, and their relatives the von Droste-Hulshoffs. All were well versed in female lore and the folktales’ lessons about proper behavior. Paradiz quotes extensively from the stories, finding parallels between the anonymous tellers not considered worthy of recognition by a male literary culture and self-sacrificing fairy tale heroines. Unlike male characters who go off to seek their fortunes, she notes, female characters often find themselves in severely circumscribed conditions until rescued by marriage to a powerful man. For a different view of fairy-tale heroines’ significance, see Joan Gould’s Spinning Straw into Gold in the December 15, 2004, issue of Kirkus Reviews.
Well researched, well crafted: sure to be welcomed in women’s-studies programs.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-7382-0917-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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