A thorough, evenhanded illumination of a contentious topic imbued with compassion and cleareyed data.
A comprehensive analysis of gender identity and the debates it continues to provoke.
Few topics have fueled the culture wars during the past decade like gender. “Hardly a day goes by across media outlets without reference to a gender-related issue, usually about children and adolescents,” write clinical psychologists Ehrensaft, author of The Gender Creative Child, and Jurkiewicz. Gender creativity is the idea that children should be able to explore their own genders in ways that make sense to them. “Human minds are creative and complex, so binary thinking is not the only way,” write the authors, who declare their allegiance to gender-diverse youth and their families while also rigorously educating readers on the bigger picture. As psychologists, they lead their discussion with a preponderance of data. “The misinformation presented in the media,” they write, “creates an unnecessary and added burden to those already carrying so much.” The authors thoughtfully examine how and why gender has become a pressing concern for today’s youth; why so much anxiety surrounds the topic (“People don’t understand what is going on as they experience…seismic shifts in gender, and the unknown feels threatening”); the lifesaving consequences of the gender-affirming model; the claims that a disproportionate number of children designated female at birth are transgender or genderqueer; and how parents can raise their children in a gender-healthy manner. Ehrensaft and Jurkiewicz also parse the controversies of gender in sports, education, and medicine, and they urge readers to engage in self-reflection to confront their own prejudices about the issue, noting how it’s a “lifelong” process to attain literacy. “We shouldn’t be aspiring to gender neutrality, but rather gender inclusivity,” they write. “It’s not ‘down with gender,’ but rather down with constricting gender rules and regulations.”
A thorough, evenhanded illumination of a contentious topic imbued with compassion and cleareyed data.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781891011559
Page Count: 304
Publisher: The Experiment
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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