Showing results by author "Anita Diamant" in All Categories

Author of the best seller The Red Tent, Anita Diamant, appears in this edition of Live at the 92nd Street Y. Diamant talks about her place in the unfolding story of America's Jewish renaissance, both as a student of Judaism and as a writer/teacher.

The dilemma of how and whether defective newborns are treated is hardly new; Plato and Aristotle both addressed the subject. But the moral questions about treatment are continually being recast by advances in medical knowledge and technology. Since neonatology is such a new field, there is often more than one way to proceed, even in such relatively noncontroversial areas as prescribing medications. And with such tiny, voiceless patients, the uncertainty of medical prognosis is acutely felt.

Set on Cape Ann in the early 1800s, The Last Days of Dogtown is peopled by widows, orphans, spinsters, scoundrels, whores, free Africans, and "witches". Nearly a decade ago, Diamant found an account of an abandoned rural backwater near the Massachusetts coastline at the turn of the nineteenth century. That pamphlet inspired a stunning novel about a small group of eccentrics and misfits, struggling in a harsh, isolated landscape only fifty miles north of Boston, yet a world away.

When Kathleen meets Joyce, each woman has come to a turning point in her life. Kathleen, whose sister died of breast cancer 15 years earlier, has just been diagnosed herself and finds her world abruptly thrown into terrifying turmoil. Joyce, increasingly distant from her awkward, adolescent daughter, is taking stock of her marriage and family, and struggling to get to grips with a burgeoning career as a novelist. Neither realizes that their chance meeting will result in a life-altering friendship.