It’s good to sound the alarm, but having a plan to go with it would be welcome.
“The digital generation” would perhaps be surprised to learn that the cultural mores around sexual relationships have an ebb and flow to them—that “hookup culture,” as it’s commonly referred to now, is similar to the way things were back in the 1960s.
The difference can be found in the underlying motivations. While the ’60s were about breaking the shackles of a conservative society, the current wave of promiscuity seems to be a factor of boredom, of not having a template for what a “relationship” means, and of the barriers around pornography dropping as the Internet grows. Freitas (Sex and the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America's College Campuses, 2008, etc.) explores her experiences with college students who, she suggests, are fed up with the emptiness and trivialization of the hookup culture. Pornography has gone from an illicit pleasure to something more akin to “research,” and the constant access afforded to the always-connected youth has resulted in a sort of expectation that the roles in pornography are the roles males and females should play if they want to fit in. Freitas examines the dogged persistence of the boys-will-be-boys stereotype that starts at an early age and is reinforced throughout childhood and adolescence; the stigma of college virginity; and the informality and “relaxed” nature of hookup culture, as opposed to the formal dinner-and-a-movie first date (or any date). She questions the role of the HBO show Girls, with its portrayals of the sex lives of women as sources of boredom and depression—is the show simply mirroring culture, or is it also reinforcing it? Freitas poses more questions than she answers, and the “practical guide” of ways to affect change only amounts to a scant few pages in an appendix, with little attention to the role of technology and the narcissism perpetuated by social networking.
It’s good to sound the alarm, but having a plan to go with it would be welcome.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0465002153
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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