Indispensable source book for courses in women’s studies, especially valuable for its coverage of a multitude of court cases.
Analysis of the issues, strategies, and tactics behind the battles that have been fought—and continue to be fought—over the rights of women in the US.
Feminist, journalist, and civil-rights attorney Rowland brings all three facets of her background to bear in this impressively documented account of the political, cultural, and legal struggles over the status and rights of American women from colonial days to the present. Her extensive research (footnotes occupy about one-quarter of the pages) turned up such a wealth of interesting material that she frequently interrupts her text with lengthy sidebars to include pertinent but auxiliary data: e.g., summaries of the contradictory laws in the 50 states regarding minor females and of the extent of AIDS/HIV around the world. The author begins with an examination of the obligations and restrictions imposed on colonial women, then moves on to the battle over birth control, the rights of women in the workplace, and the rights of reproductive privacy. She scrutinizes the impact of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on issues involving gender discrimination, sexual harassment, and employment inequity. She also looks at the legal and social implications of advances in reproductive technology and takes a critical look at the issue of violence against women. Throughout, Rowland focuses on court cases and the impact of their outcomes. Deeply concerned by the tactics of those who are resistant to changes in public policy regarding the status of women, she cites President Bush and conservative Christian activists for attempting to undermine or undo the progress women made in the latter decades of the 20th century. “Some men will fight forever to limit the reproductive choices of women,” Rowland warns, asserting that women are losing ground, and that the trend will continue unless feminist activists adopt a new, more aggressive game plan.
Indispensable source book for courses in women’s studies, especially valuable for its coverage of a multitude of court cases.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-57248-368-7
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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