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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
IN THE NEWS
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
