This is brilliant stuff, cutting through nonsense, letting men speak for themselves and taking from their words original and...
In this pathbreaking study of the contemporary “male crisis,” award-winning journalist and author Faludi solidifies her reputation first gained in Backlash (1991) as one of our most astute analysts of gender relations.
Something is wrong with men. They are unhappy, angry, bewildered, and all too often violent. Conventional wisdom—which Faludi always delights in skewering—suggests that either men must change their individual natures to overcome this crisis or that men are victims of the undeserving: “scheming feminists, affirmative-action proponents, job-grabbing illegal aliens.” Faludi comes to a different conclusion. In the course of spending time with men—laid-off industrial workers, bewildered Vietnam vets, young male sexual predators, evangelical truth seekers, and many others—chronicling their thoughts, aspirations, explanations, and exasperations, she finds that men are not to blame for their current predicament, nor on the whole is some sinister other. Rather, American men of the post-WWII world have been betrayed by culture and society. Taught by fathers to assume inheritance of a world they would firmly control, it turns out they don't control it at all. Meaningful work that both established and existed within a broader social purpose is gone for all but a few. The virtues of trust and loyalty are now laughable anachronisms. All that is left of masculinity is an ornamental facade of what Faludi terms individual male “superdominance.” This pose of control without a reality behind it is surely a recipe for crisis. Yet it is this very pose of control that prevents men from seeing their dilemma as a human crisis of powerlessness in modern society (one women recognized long ago) and collectively acting to change their situation. Instead, they howl at the moon to recapture their masculinity or lash out at supposed enemies. In the end, the more they struggle the more tightly they are bound.
This is brilliant stuff, cutting through nonsense, letting men speak for themselves and taking from their words original and compassionate insights. Bravo.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-12299-X
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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