Interesting profiles, ho-hum analysis.
A by-now familiar study of accomplished, powerful women and their inability to combine high-octane careers with motherhood in the existing corporate culture.
Hewlett (coauthor, The War Against Parents, 1998) began interviewing prominent achievers in diverse fields for a book about women turning 50 in the millennium. Then she found that none of her subjects had children and, delving further, that none of them had deliberately chosen to be childless. Focusing on high-achieving professionals ages 40-55, the author tries to determine how these female lawyers, bankers, and physicians differ from their male counterparts, most of whom are able to balance work and family. Unfortunately, Hewlett breaks no news with her discoveries. She concludes that moving up the career ladder requires long hours, including important “face time” extending late into the evening. Many “ultra-high achievers” also have to travel several times each month, and their few remaining evening hours are spent answering business e-mail and voicemail. In this sort of work culture, high-achieving women are hard-pressed to find a mate, especially since they often want to marry highly successful men who may find a “less threatening” woman more appealing. By the time a woman has successfully negotiated a career, found a suitable spouse, and decided to have children, she may be too old to conceive without medical intervention. Corporate America is the villain here, feels Hewlett, whose less-then-groundbreaking solutions include a time bank of six months of paid leave that can be taken throughout a child’s life, the creation of high-level jobs that allow for reduced hours, and the promotion of new legislation to eliminate long-hour work weeks. Astonishingly, the author feels that this book will “help young women find both love and work” by encouraging them to become highly proactive in finding a partner and having children early.
Interesting profiles, ho-hum analysis.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6766-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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