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
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
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.
In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House.
In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates. (“As a strategy for picking up girls, my pseudo-intellectualism proved mostly worthless,” he admits.) Yet seriousness did come to him in time and, with it, the conviction that America could live up to its stated aspirations. His early political role as an Illinois state senator, itself an unlikely victory, was not big enough to contain Obama’s early ambition, nor was his term as U.S. Senator. Only the presidency would do, a path he painstakingly carved out, vote by vote and speech by careful speech. As he writes, “By nature I’m a deliberate speaker, which, by the standards of presidential candidates, helped keep my gaffe quotient relatively low.” The author speaks freely about the many obstacles of the race—not just the question of race and racism itself, but also the rise, with “potent disruptor” Sarah Palin, of a know-nothingism that would manifest itself in an obdurate, ideologically driven Republican legislature. Not to mention the meddlings of Donald Trump, who turns up in this volume for his idiotic “birther” campaign while simultaneously fishing for a contract to build “a beautiful ballroom” on the White House lawn. A born moderate, Obama allows that he might not have been ideological enough in the face of Mitch McConnell, whose primary concern was then “clawing [his] way back to power.” Indeed, one of the most compelling aspects of the book, as smoothly written as his previous books, is Obama’s cleareyed scene-setting for how the political landscape would become so fractured—surely a topic he’ll expand on in the next volume.
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6316-9
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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