Overview
Raised in Australia, Helen Caldicott trained as a physician and devoted herself to the treatment of children afflicted with cystic fibrosis. But it was in the political turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s that she found her true calling. Resigning from the faculty of Harvard Medical School, she helped to found and was the first president of the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and the Women's Action for Nuclear Disarmament (WAND), two organizations at the forefront of the nuclear-freeze movement. Over the next ten years Caldicott brought her message to world leaders, to the media, and to audiences of thousands whom she roused to action with singular eloquence. In 1985, PSR's umbrella affiliate, the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, was the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Physician, wife, and mother of three, Caldicott found that success as an activist did not come without cost. She reflects on the adverse impact her political work, with its constant traveling, had on her family, her medical career, and her personal well-being.Editorials
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 espousestreachery to which the navet 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. (Sept.)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., DenverKirkus 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.