Absurd and often witty takes on life as a caregiver, mother, and woman.
The creator of an iconic cartoon strip shares her quirky humor in prose form.
Like millions of other women, Guisewite (The Mother-Daughter Dance, 2016, etc.), creator of the megapopular comic strip “Cathy,” has fears, concerns, and outrages; from 1976 to 2010, she expressed them all with a delightful sense of fun. Now that she’s retired from drawing her “Cathy” strip, which at its peak appeared in more than 1,400 newspapers, the author turns to prose, presenting short essays and sidebars about her major life change when the strip ended. “I got older,” she writes, “which I hadn’t factored in, and became even more obnoxious and belligerent than my child or my parents, incapable of even committing to exercise five minutes a day. I thought that when I quit my job, the pace of all the change would slow down. But it didn’t. It sped up.” The author’s topics, many of which she explored in her comic strip, range widely: aging parents who refuse to let go of their stuff and don’t feel old despite being in their 90s; how she has outgrown all her shoes; eating and skin care habits and body image issues; inability to fit into a sports bra; desire to commit to an exercise program; terror at trying on a swimsuit; the difficulties of organizing a house; her life with her now college-bound daughter and how much things have changed for women since her own mother was young. Although some of the essays are repetitive and clunky in their attempts at comedy, Guisewite hits the mark more often than not. It’s a collection that isn’t likely to appeal to readers who were never “Cathy” fans (Ack!), but the author offers a new way to savor the humor of her classic comic-strip character.
Absurd and often witty takes on life as a caregiver, mother, and woman.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1842-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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
PERSPECTIVES
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