A useful primer on why America’s treatment of raw sewage doesn’t pass the smell test.
Imagine that your septic system fails after you lost your job because of Covid-19 or another disaster. Your yard turns into a sewer, and you don’t have thousands of dollars for a new tank. Flowers shows that if your state enforces laws that criminalize the failure to maintain a legal septic tank, you could also get arrested. She sees such tragedies frequently among the mostly poor, Black residents of Lowndes County, where “an estimated 90 percent of households have failing or inadequate wastewater systems.” In an imperfect blend of memoir and reporting, the author recalls her years of work to ease conditions so unsanitary a U.N. official said he hadn’t seen them “in the first world.” With admirable tenacity, Flowers cultivated reporters; got help from Jane Fonda; took Cory Booker to visit a man whose backyard “held a pit full of waste piped straight from his toilet”; and persuaded Baylor doctors to conduct a study of the region, which found that 34.5% of tested residents had hookworm, a disease of poor sanitation that many people thought the U.S. had eradicated. Similarly dire sewage problems, she shows, exist in places from Appalachia to the San Joaquin Valley. In a largely chronological narrative, Flowers tends to present facts in the order in which she learned them—not when readers most need to know them—and slows the pace with overlong digressions into her earlier years and unedifying passages on topics such as “turning lemons into lemonade” and the effect of Jonathan Livingston Seagull on her life. The urgent message of the book, however, transcends its writing lapses, and it should raise much-needed awareness of a public health catastrophe.
A useful primer on why America’s treatment of raw sewage doesn’t pass the smell test.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-62097-608-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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