A thoughtful meditation on the intersection of life and art.
An intimate look at motherhood and creativity.
Years ago, when her now-college-age children were in elementary school, Phillips, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for James Tiptree, Jr., began wondering if “maternal bliss conspires with maternal guilt to erode creative work.” Interweaving personal reflections with biographical sketches of British and North American writers and artists, she considers a question that has vexed them all: “How can I have children without sacrificing my vocation, my perspective, my independence, my mind?” The book takes its title from an accusation made by the in-laws of painter Alice Neel: When she was trying to finish a painting, they claimed, she left her baby on the fire escape. Like Neel, other women struggled to find time and space for mothering: Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Carter, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Shirley Jackson are among many whose lives and work Phillips explores. “I’ve tried to look at the moments when their maternal or creative selves seem to fall apart,” writes the author, “when they get lost in the woods and come out—if they do come out—with new insight, and with themselves changed.” Their responses to motherhood range from rebellion to celebration. Lessing abandoned her two toddlers, explaining that she was leaving them “to fight economic injustice and racism.” She soon longed for them and pleaded with her estranged husband to allow her to see them; after two years, he finally gave in, not without criticizing her political views and unconventional lifestyle. Le Guin, on the other hand, felt nourished by her family, and “she claimed authority by leaving home in her work, writing about male protagonists in invented worlds.” Phillips admits there is no simple answer to her overarching question, although A.S. Byatt comes close: “What you have to learn to do is pay complete attention to two things at once.”
A thoughtful meditation on the intersection of life and art.Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-393-08859-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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
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