A valuable record of the collective’s contributions to a growing cultural awareness of feminist issues and criticism,...
A collection of feminist essays on sex, gender, pop culture, politics, and friendship.
Originally founded in 2004 by three like-minded graduate students at Emory University, the Crunk Feminist Collective was revived in 2010 as a blog and outlet for the members’ opinions, cultural analyses, and personal stories in the age of digital feminism. Bringing together their most popular posts from 2010 to 2015, the book is a diverse assemblage of essays, missives, rants, and confessions. Though the pieces range in style and subject matter, they all mix a deeply passionate and intellectual backbone with informal, accessible language that addresses feminist issues of gender, politics, and race and racism. Before delving into these topics, the collection includes a mission statement, manifesto, and an introduction to getting crunk, which proclaim the group’s mission to “create a space of support and camaraderie for hip hop generation feminists of color, queer and straight, [with]in the academy and without,” and define crunkness as “our commitment to feminist principles and politics.” Their “mode of resistance” is to rail against patriarchal power structures, defend and humanize Black Lives Matter, and dissect African-American representation in the media. (There are several essays on Beyoncé.) The group also tackles sensitive personal subjects for communities of color, such as coming out, reproductive rights, and mental health. The writers of the collective exhibit an extraordinary breadth of intellectual range, but their critiques often favor anecdotal evidence rather than a more substantive argument. Nonetheless, there is plenty to provoke thought, and the collection serves as a call to action for enlightenment-seekers. The editors also include a “Crunk Glossary” to define relevant terms, including “genderqueer” and “misogynoir,” which “refers to the unique hatred that Black women and girls experience in American visual and popular culture.”
A valuable record of the collective’s contributions to a growing cultural awareness of feminist issues and criticism, particularly for women of color.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55861-943-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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