A well-curated but disjointed collection of post-disaster Lebanese female voices.
A Lebanese journalist interviews the nation’s women about the impact of a deadly, unexplained explosion in Beirut.
On Aug. 4, 2020, a warehouse storing ammonium nitrate caught fire and exploded in Beirut’s port, killing at least 220 people and injuring 6,000, including many foreign nationals. The disaster not only occurred in the middle of the pandemic, but also during an unprecedented economic crisis that spurred nationwide protests against Lebanon’s wealthy ruling class. Mawad, a Paris-based journalist, mother, and relative of an assassinated Lebanese president, began reporting stories that often focused on the “psychological toll of the blast.” Most of the author’s interviewees were women. “I began putting together survivors’ stories, particularly from women, although that was never a deliberate choice at the outset,” she writes. “Many of these women lost everything that day: the most precious people in their lives, their physical and mental health, their homes and livelihoods, their ability to be happy and to feel in any way secure.” Mawad intersperses a collection of these interviews with historical context and her emotional reactions to hearing the women’s words. The author includes conversations with a variety of people, including nurses, doctors, Syrian refugees, and at least one former celebrity. Toward the end, Mawad describes her decision to move with her daughter to Paris, stating that she was escaping “an abusive relationship with my country,” which she classifies as a “failed state.” At its best, the book is deeply researched and profoundly moving. At times, the author’s descriptions of her personal reactions divert attention from the women’s powerful stories. Likewise, her rage about her country’s failures feels more suited to memoir than reporting. The result is a book that, despite many moments of literary merit, suffers from a lack of cohesion.
A well-curated but disjointed collection of post-disaster Lebanese female voices.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781399406253
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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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