An impressive piece of scholarship that seeks to bring passion into the lesbian history of late 17th and 18th century England. Closely reading the literature of the period, novelist Donoghue (Stir-Fry, 1994) gives her reader meticulously detailed evidence that during the years 16681801 lesbianism was popularly represented. Contrary to historians who have a tendency to dilute and dismiss bonds between women as sisterly affection, Donoghue asserts that women who loved women during the 18th century did not only have friendship on their minds. While the word lesbian could be used in the context of friendship, the term ``tribade'' (from Greek, meaning ``a woman who rubs'') was most commonly used to describe any woman capable of enjoying sex with another. With chapters on female hermaphrodites, female husbands, cross-dressing, romantic friendship, and erotica, Donoghue explores a range of female relationships from the platonic to the sexual. She does not shy away from the controversial when she examines the erotica of the time (almost exclusively written by men) and gains affirmation from the lesbian eroticism found in a literature other feminists might deem offensive. A lesbian herself, Donoghue's investment in her own text makes it all the more engaging. She deserves credit for making a distinction between lesbian and bisexual history and explicitly states that her book is a ``shared'' one. She also does well to emphasize that gay male history and lesbian history should be studied separately. While her prose is crisp and sometimes refreshingly ironic, Donoghue falls into the academic trap of overloading her reader with exhaustive textual examples. At times slow going, but nonetheless offering historical affirmation of an erotic and romantic lesbian presence during this period.
Pub Date: May 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-017261-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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