A Desperate Passion: An Autobiography
- Book Review,
by Helen Broinowski Caldicott
Amazon.com
Our memories fade quickly. As recently as the 1980s, nuclear war seemed a very real possibility. Nuclear weapons in Germany pointed at the Soviet Union; similar missiles in Russia were aimed at Europe and beyond. The United States spent money on an outer-space shield to ward off attacking missiles. And people protested. Foremost among them was Helen Broinowski Caldicott, the first president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, who led an educated but passionate fight to slow the arms race and prevent worldwide catastrophe. Time has allowed Caldicott a measure of distance to judge her own affairs, and she does so in this book, which examines a loss of her personal life, her recollection of the struggles, and her unleashing of emotions during these "traumatic events."
From Publishers Weekly
Intoxicated by radical movements at home and in the U.S., Australian-born Caldicott risked her marriage, family and career (including a Harvard appointment) to promote atomic disarmament and disparage (especially in Nuclear Madness) atomic power, to publicize feminist concerns and to press an environmentalist agenda. Although dumped by a backbiting male cabal as first president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, she remains a passionate exponent of her convictions, often, it seems, not letting reality intrude on them. Soviet leader Brezhnev and Foreign Minister Gromyko are among her heroes, as is Cuba's Fidel Castro. The Feds, she asserts, designated New Mexico a "national sacrifice area," permitting it to be radioactively polluted "for the national good." In 1983, she charges, "Humanity was almost converted to radioactive dust" because of a "belligerent NATO exercise." Readers who persist beyond the gushiness, self-deception and Hollywood name dropping here will find an underlying pathos in the price of Caldicott's idealism and in the capacity for betrayal among competitors in the causes she espouses?treachery to which the naivete that helped stir her audiences left her exposed. "I was devastated," she confesses, "that dishonest dynamics could operate within one of the leading peace organizations of the country." Caldicott has a flair for humane causes but not compelling prose. Only partisans are likely to plow through to the end. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Caldicott's autobiography is a candid and often painfully revealing self-portrait of a major spokesperson of the early antinuclear movement and one of the founders of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Caldicott trained as a pediatrician in her native Australia and became an activist in the early 1970s when she learned of France's violation of the International Test Ban Treaty. While she devotes the first half of her book to her childhood, school years, and family relationships, which is interesting and probably necessary in an autobiography, her early experiences pale in comparison with the later details of her "desperate passion" in alerting the world to the horrors of nuclear war and nuclear waste. She becomes animated and compelling in her descriptions of her struggle to balance medicine and activism with family life. Caldicott is brutally frank in recounting the toll her activism took on her marriage, her children's lives, and her personal happiness. Her memoir will strongly appeal to environmental historians, activists, physicians, and women's studies scholars.?Susan Maret, Univ. of Colorado Lib., DenverCopyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Walter Reich
Those who saw Dr. Caldicott ... as a leader for the good will read her book as the memoirs of a fighter for life and peace who blessed the world.... Those who saw her as a whirling dervish of simplistic anti-nuclear rhetoric ... will read her book as a confirmation of their worst judgments of her tireless crusade.
From Booklist
To say that Caldicott's first 50 years were lived fully would be to greatly understate facts. In her autobiography, the Australian physician-activist and mother of three meditates on her formative years, then proceeds to candidly assess her achievements in medicine, in the nuclear-freeze movement, and on the home front. It is exhausting just following Caldicott's account of years spent traveling to speaking engagements for the Physicians for Social Responsibility and for Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament as well as engaging in other political activities. As a prominent, respected authority, Caldicott was called on to address groups on every continent and continues to be involved in environmental issues. This remarkable woman reveals the repercussions of those endeavors on her relationships with her children and the ultimate toll on her marriage. Alice Joyce
From Kirkus Reviews
A maverick's life, told with grace and good humor. Caldicott (Missile Envy, 1984), famed as an antinuclear activist and as a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility but less well known as an early researcher of cystic fibrosis, has much to tell. Born Helen Broinowski (``Nobody with Polish and Irish ancestry--as I have--has any right to expect a quiet, easy life'') into a family of Australian social progressives, she was one of the first female medical doctors to practice in her native country. She was also, early on, an outspoken critic and pacifist: ``I have taken on the establishment in society,'' she writes. ``I tend to have independent views which are often not popular initially, and I am impelled to speak the truth with little regard for the prevailing norms of society.'' That much is evident in her narrative of her early days as an activist, when she gave talks to Australian ladies' clubs and delivered the feminist gospel according to Germaine Greer--along with frank reminders that venereal disease is a possible outcome of sexual intimacy. Such remarks shocked her staid listeners. In later years, she has crusaded more widely for women's causes, for socialized medicine, for gun control (``the United States . . . is full of strange people carrying guns''), and, of course, for disarmament and the abolition of nuclear testing. One of the highlights of her book is an aside on how she bluffed Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, playing each off against the other, into endorsing her call for arms talks. Closely concerned with the big issues of our time, Caldicott does not often share the quotidian details of her own life, but when she does, it is with emotional power, as when she writes affectingly of the dissolution of her long marriage, and of her love for the natural world. A treat for Caldicott's many admirers. (16 pages photos, not seen) (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Bloomsbury Review
Our contaminated air and our fractured earth demand a doctor's attention in the nuclear age, and the doctor on this case is a master.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy
Helen Caldicott was the First Lady of the Nuclear Freeze Movement in the 1980s. This story, by an extraordinary woman, is a compelling memoir of those extraordinary times.
Book Description
"Dr. Helen Caldicott," the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle declares, "is back on the scene." A Desperate Passion is Caldicott's engaging, inspiring memoir, chronicling her life both on and off the scene. Raised in Australia and trained as a physician, she first found her voice protesting French nuclear tests in the Pacific. Years later she rose to international prominence, founding Physicians for Social Responsibility, "which did perhaps more than any other group to thrust the nuclear issue under the public eye" (New York Times). "Driven by intense passions, she seems to have adopted the world's population as her children. And all of us are probably better off as a result" (East Bay Express Books)--but Caldicott, wife and mother of three, found that her success did not come without cost. This is a personal story too, a candid, revealing self-portrait of a woman who has not relinquished her remarkable efforts to save the world.
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