This searing exposé on war’s remnants convincingly makes the case that gender inequality may be one of the greatest threats...
A gripping, ground-floor look at the lingering ravages of conflict in some of the deadliest contemporary war zones.
Photographer and activist Jones (Kabul in Winter, 2007, etc.), an award-winning authority on domestic violence, turns her journalistic sights on women in areas where war and its grim aftermath have significantly altered their lives. The author recounts her experiences from 2007 to 2009 while volunteering with the International Rescue Committee in Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Congo, as well as in Burmese refugee camps in Thailand and with Iraqi refugees scattered throughout Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The IRC’s basic project was to enable women in these troubled areas to “examine their problems and present suggestions to improve their lives,” and they provided digital cameras to small groups of women, asking them to photograph some things they found pleasing, others they found problematic, and then gathered the women and other locals to exhibit and discuss the photos. It is difficult to choose the more powerful result: Jones’s intimate portrayal of disturbingly similar atrocities exposed in each region, or the self-awakening and solidarity the graphic recording of their living conditions occasioned in the photographers. For example, in the Congo, a renowned gynecologist reported surgically treating more than 10,000 rape victims from 2004 to 2008—“the oldest patient was eighty-three, the youngest nine months”; at the IRC women’s photo exhibition, one of the photographers explained why they had cloaked their subject in a sheet: “We covered her face because we did not want to show her identity—and she could be any one of us.” After describing the conundrum faced by Burmese refugees in Thai camps—“they can’t return to their own country, and they can’t enter this new one”—Jones wryly observes: “A photo is not always worth a thousand words. Sometimes you need the words to grasp the photo; without them, you would never know that the graceful lady with the rosy umbrella passing over the pretty river has no place to go.”
This searing exposé on war’s remnants convincingly makes the case that gender inequality may be one of the greatest threats to peace.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9111-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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