An erudite group effort encapsulating a long, laborious struggle that continues today.
Three distinguished academics offer a competent, compact history of the women’s liberation movement.
Hoping to “set the record straight” in challenging former perceptions of American women’s activism, Cobble (History and Labor Studies/Rutgers Univ.; Sex of Class: Women Transforming American Labor, 2007, etc.), Gordon (History and the Humanities/New York Univ.; Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, 2009, etc.) and Henry (Women’s Studies/Grinnell Coll.; Not My Mother’s Sister: Generational Conflict and Third-Wave Feminism, 2004) condense a century’s worth of groundbreaking feminist lobbying into three densely packed sections. Cobble charts feminism’s early post-suffrage years from the 1920s to the 1960s, with a particular focus on the fiercely passionate social justice “gender pioneers” of the labor movement who fought for economic equality and civil rights. Gordon vibrantly chronicles the women’s liberation period through the “sex equality” decades of the 1960s to the 1980s, during which self-defined sexuality was championed alongside politically productive feminists’ organizations and sex-positive efforts. In the final section, Henry follows the movement’s progression through the millennial generation of women (and men) who employed the freedoms their predecessors fought so stridently for. Rebirthing the cause and continuing the good fight for gender equality, she writes, their efforts helped neutralize the stigma of LGBT visibility, “girlie feminism” and challenges to female reproductive rights in the 1990s. The authors’ comprehensive appreciation counters popular held myths by documenting the losses along with the progress, dispelling the imagery of the feminist as a “humorless, sexless reformer,” and, perhaps most profoundly, arguing against the belief that feminism is a marginal, minority-focused fight for equality when, to Cobble, Gordon, Henry and supporters nationwide, “it is a cause for everyone.” All three perspectives converge into a dramatic historical statement on the past and present condition of women’s rights and its power and omnipresence.
An erudite group effort encapsulating a long, laborious struggle that continues today.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-87140-676-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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