Memories of and musings on the relationships between women, from novelist Peterson (Duck and Cover, 1991, etc.). Sisters are the focus of this memoir cum study—the author's two biological sisters, Paula and Marla, her extended sisterhood of women friends, and even the nonhuman sisters she finds in a dolphin pod or a herd of elephants. Peterson searches wide and deep within her own past and those of others to fill in her complex picture of sisterhood. These relationships often involve caregiving—Marla and Paula are nurses, whereas the author, the eldest sister, has adopted the role of family nurturer—but they can be hurtful as well. Peterson devotes one chapter to the breakup of a friendship with one of her ``chosen'' sisters, a cruel and arbitrary rift that she still doesn't understand, though several years have passed. Peterson also describes how she and her sisters were abused throughout their childhood by their mother. On the other hand, she is exclusive of men but for the most part nonbelligerent toward them. Her father was largely absentee, while her younger brother, the father of four girls, is comfortable with women and women's bonds. A few of Peterson's stories and characters stand out: Paula's neurosurgery and how her sisters coaxed her back from a coma; the Crones, a group of postmenopausal women who share the secrets of aging and companionship with great good humor and sensitivity; and a raucous slumber party for women well beyond adolescence. Other pieces are less successful, and finding out that Peterson is bisexual two-thirds through the book, one feels at first betrayed, as if the preceding ruminations on sisterhood have become retroactively incestuous. (For more on this topic, see Sister to Sister, edited by Patricia Foster, p. 1467.) But despite this unwonted secrecy and the book's New Age tinge, this is clearly a labor of love that is both thoughtful and touching.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-670-85296-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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
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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