Fascinatingly, viscerally haunting.
An excavation of a familial cover-up illuminates broader mysteries of 20th-century Ireland.
In her 20s, Wills, a professor of English at Cambridge and the author of Lovers and Strangers and That Neutral Island, learned she had a cousin she didn’t know existed. The book begins with a cast of characters, all of whom are relatives of the author, divided into four temporal categories: the Victorians, which include Wills’ grandmother; the post-revolutionary generation; the postwar generation, which includes the author; and the next generation. “I keep returning to a story of a generation gone wrong in my own family,” she writes, “a mother not married, and a child stifled.” In the 1950s, the author’s uncle fathered a daughter (the aforementioned cousin) with his lover and, with the mother’s knowledge, abandoned both to a “mother-and-baby home.” Between 1922 and 1998, these institutions homed at least 56,000 unwed mothers and even more infants. In 2014, nearly 800 of their bodies were found in sewer chambers, which sparked a massive investigation into the inhumane conditions. “They did not survive, yet they have not gone away,” writes Wills about the mistreated mothers and children. The author describes her family’s story within this larger context: “To us, now, it seems pretty much unthinkable, yet the distance between us and the people who believed in the system (or believed enough) is very small.” Wills explores the specific ways in which inherited past lives on, offering a searing yet nuanced investigation into the lives of complicit relatives, such as her mother, as well as tender portraits of those affected. The author’s prose is stellar; her cadence complements this compelling tale, which grew increasingly complex over years of meticulous research. Ultimately, she emphasizes that “everything I’ve been describing was not out of the ordinary.”
Fascinatingly, viscerally haunting.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780374611866
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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 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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