Neither the sentiment nor the passion is new. But Paretsky links different kinds of oppression in compelling ways.
A lacerating polemical memoir from the creator of V.I. Warshawski.
“Every writer’s difficult journey is a movement from silence to speech,” observes Paretsky, who looks here at five areas in which she’s struggled to wrest her individual voice from the command to be voiceless. She begins with her Kansas childhood, spent as the only sister among four brothers and a pair of needy, feuding parents who depended on her mothering and expressed no interest in what she thought or wrote. Next she recalls moving to Chicago at the time of Martin Luther King’s civil-rights ministry, noting that she’s always sided with underdogs because “I’m as needy as the most helpless.” She reviews the impact of Second Wave Feminism on her attempts to imagine women who were neither household angels nor rebellious monsters but simply human beings. She analyzes the dialectic of individualism and community in the hardboiled detective story, tracing Warshawski’s development from a Philip Marlowe in skirts to a heroine immersed in communal ties despite her own independence. And she concludes by surveying current threats to writers’ freedom to speak out, from the increasingly centralized power of market-driven publishers and chain stores to the repressive specter of the Patriot Act. Her own voice, untrammeled by the need of her Warshawski novels (Fire Sale, 2005, etc.) to provide detection, melodrama and shifts in mood, is ardent, angry and almost painfully direct. Readers will overlook occasional factual slips (talking about Raymond Chandler, Paretsky maintains that Carmen Sternwood never killed anyone and transfers the plot of Farewell, My Lovely to The Long Goodbye) in favor of her impassioned plea for the freedom to find one’s voice and her uncompromising indictment of the forces—familial, social, political—that would impose silence.
Neither the sentiment nor the passion is new. But Paretsky links different kinds of oppression in compelling ways.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-84467-122-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
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
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
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