Insightful case studies that explore how young women are negotiating the pressures of sexual and professional liberation.
Sociologist and psychotherapist Bell investigates the generation of women in their 20s who, despite unprecedented opportunities, are struggling to find balance in their emotional and sexual lives.
Born after 1972, the year the author identifies as a cultural turning point for women, this younger generation may have more choices than their foremothers, but she claims, they are also confused and overwhelmed by them. Bell is particularly interested in looking at the sexual attitudes and behaviors of these newly liberated young women. Using both sociological and psychological methodology, she presents several interviews as case studies. The author discovered that these women generally fell into three categories: the Sexual Woman, who is comfortable with herself sexually but has difficulty trusting the security of relationships; the Relational Woman, who seeks out relationships at the expense of her own fulfillment; and the Desiring Woman, who has found a way to successfully integrate competing societal and personal expectations to become more confident and secure. Bell also discovered that these young women are often “splitting” to form two distinct selves rather than incorporating the differences to become a whole person. The author concludes that positive role models who can exhibit fulfillment in their sexual, professional and familial lives are necessary to help these young women become comfortable with their own identities. While this is an academic study, Bell’s clear prose and accessible subject matter will appeal to both scholars of women’s studies and young women looking for an explanation of some of the predicaments their generation faces. Though it’s far from being a self-help book, the author does offer some sage advice for young women navigating this brave new world.
Insightful case studies that explore how young women are negotiating the pressures of sexual and professional liberation.Pub Date: March 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-0520261495
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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