A bit of a potpourri but a witty book full of insights, opinions, and good advice.
From the London-based Australian co-creator and host of The Guilty Feminist podcast comes a book-length version of that program.
A stand-up comedian who also hosts the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series Deborah Frances-White Rolls the Dice, the author opens her chapters with the phrase “I’m a feminist but” and proceeds with an example of a cause of remorse, such as lying about one’s weight by 20 pounds or mistaking Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique for the name of a classic perfume. Throughout the narrative, there are abundant examples of Frances-White’s weaknesses and the rifts between good intentions and human behavior, and she encourages feminists to shed their guilt and take up their “most unapologetic and persuasive voice.” In Part 1, the author provides a capsule history of the feminist movements and her opinions on their significance. In parts 2 and 3, Frances-White broadens her reach, taking on the air of the podcast, which she describes as a microclimate where women are given power, space, and the assumption of brilliance. The text features a mix of various pieces from the podcast. She includes her own angry speech about Brexit, her stand-up comedy bit satirizing how women undermine themselves, an irony-filled piece on Harvey Weinstein, and her feminist rewrite of the famous speech in Henry V, which ends with the rousing cry, “God for Women, Feminism, and Saint Angelou!” Frances-White also muses on the diet industry, the fun of makeup, being open to other people’s struggles, toxic masculinity, Donald Trump, female fertility, sexism in religion (now an atheist, she was raised as a member of Jehovah’s Witnesses), and women’s own sexual submission fantasies. Confidently opinionated, the author gives other feminist writers a voice, introducing them proudly and interviewing them intelligently. Fans of the TV series Fleabag will relish her lengthy interview with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, its creator and star.
A bit of a potpourri but a witty book full of insights, opinions, and good advice.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-58005-954-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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
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